For decades, one idea has dominated much of business thinking. Value is something that can ultimately be expressed in financial terms. Companies generate profits, investors receive returns, and economic growth becomes a measure of progress. But what happens when the things that sustain our economy and society, such as healthy ecosystems, trust, freedom, social cohesion or biodiversity, are treated as secondary because of the changing climate?

For Eva Rood, Director of the Positive Change Initiative & the Erasmus Platform for Sustainable Value Creation at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM), this question goes to the heart of how we need to rethink business education and the role of future leaders. Having worked at Erasmus University since 1998 in various roles, Eva has seen sustainability move from something relatively peripheral to an increasingly important part of how the university thinks about business and management. Since becoming Director of the Positive Change Initiative in 2017, she has worked to embed this broader understanding of value into education.

At the centre of her thinking is a relatively simple idea: financial value matters, but it cannot be the only value that matters. But what do we actually mean by value?

The meaning of value

The debate around integrated value challenges one of the most deeply rooted assumptions in traditional business thinking that economic value should take the centre stage. There are growing efforts to measure social and ecological impact. Doing so can help companies understand impacts that conventional financial accounting often overlooks. Yet Eva argues that there is also an important academic debate about whether everything should or even can be measured or monetised. For her, integrated value is better understood as a platform for thinking about value creation more broadly.

Companies operate within societies and ecosystems. Their success depends on things that rarely appear directly in financial statements, such as functioning governments, freedom of expression, trust between people, healthy soils, biodiversity and stable communities. One exercise Eva uses with students makes this idea personal. Rather than immediately talking about companies or sustainability frameworks, she asks a much simpler question: What is value to you?

The answers might include freedom, entrepreneurship, family, security, nature or independence. We already understand intuitively that value is multidimensional in our personal lives. The challenge is bringing that same understanding into our professional and economic decisions.

Eva illustrates this through the Sustainable Development Goals. Focusing exclusively on one goal or one type of value while ignoring everything else can create new problems elsewhere. A functioning society depends on multiple systems simultaneously. The question therefore becomes: how much value are we creating, what kind of value are we creating and for whom?

Making positive change part of the DNA

The focus of Rotterdam School of Management (RSM) on responsible management did not emerge overnight. The school has a long tradition of engaging with ethical and responsible business questions and was, as Eva describes it, an “early bird” in responsible management education. Around nine years ago, these ambitions began evolving explicitly with the adoption of the mission ‘to be a force for positive change in the world’, using the framework of Sustainable Development Goals to communicate what positive change looks like. Sustainability and ethics can be included in individual courses. The more ambitious question for RSM was whether this way of thinking could become part of their DNA.

With support from the school's leadership, Eva and her colleagues began exploring how positive change could be integrated across programmes rather than treated as a separate topic. Today, RSM is working on defining its ambitions and considering how that integration can be measured. But that creates another challenge: what exactly should be measured?

The three interconnected layers

For Eva, the answer cannot be reduced to one sustainability indicator. Positive change is deliberately broad, and the challenge is to identify the skills and perspectives students need to develop.

Her approach considers three interconnected layers:

Self
Your professional role within an organisation and society
And the role of your organisation on the planet

The first begins with the individual. Who are you? What is important to you, what are your values and how will those values influence the decisions you make? The second layer expands that perspective to your professional role and to society. Who are you as a professional? What do you bring to the team? How does the organisation you work for affect employees, communities and institutions? Finally comes the planet. How does the organisation interact with the natural systems on which society and the economy ultimately depend? These questions force students to think beyond their future job title or salary. They invite a more fundamental reflection: Do I want to work for an organisation that contributes to a better world or one whose activities undermine it?

For Eva, meaningful change starts with individuals understanding what they can bring into their teams and organisations. This is also why reflection has become an important part of the Positive Change Initiative's work with students. Rather than telling students what responsible leadership should look like, reflection encourages them to connect sustainability questions with their own professional identity.

Bringing the real world into the university

Universities can develop new theories, frameworks and models for sustainable value creation. But those ideas ultimately need to function outside academia. This is where the Erasmus Platform for Sustainable Value Creation plays an important role. The platform brings together frontrunning companies and academics to exchange experiences, challenges and knowledge. Companies can share what they are struggling with in practice, while researchers gain a better understanding of the questions businesses are actually facing.

For Eva this connection provides an essential reality check. Research becomes richer when it is confronted with practical experience. At the same time, businesses gain access to new ideas and academic perspectives that can challenge established ways of thinking. Most importantly, it means universities do not need to wait until today's students become executives, investors or policymakers before trying to create change. Change can also happen through the people who already hold those positions. By connecting students, researchers and current business leaders, the platform becomes a bridge between the ideas being developed inside the university and the decisions being made in the economy today.

When sustainability meets resistance

This broader understanding of value is not universally accepted. ESG and the Sustainable Development Goals have increasingly become subjects of political and economic debate. Some argue that the primary responsibility of companies is simply to obey the law and generate financial returns, leaving broader societal responsibilities to governments and individuals. Eva encounters these different perspectives too.

Her response is not necessarily to begin with another framework, dataset or sustainability target. Instead, she points to the importance of connecting these questions to something personal. One example is Commonland's 4 Returns (https://commonland.com/4-returns-framework/) approach, which considers financial, natural and social returns alongside a fourth dimension: inspiration. That final element recognises something conventional models of value can struggle to capture: people need a reason to care.

Eva describes this as connecting sustainability to the heart rather than only the head. One way of doing that is remarkably simple: ask people which Sustainable Development Goal matters most to them personally.

“Even the most rational people have an emotional link to nature or aspects of society.”

For one person, that connection may be bird watching. For another, it may be running to raise funds to tackle poverty, equality, mental health or sailing the oceans... Once sustainability becomes connected to something someone personally values, the discussion changes. It is no longer only an abstract conversation about ESG frameworks or regulation. There is a motive for change.

Reality may force us to rethink value

So how might our understanding of value change over the next five to ten years? Eva believes the physical world itself will increasingly confront us with the limitations of financial thinking. Extreme weather events, ecosystem degradation and biodiversity loss are no longer distant theoretical risks. Their consequences are becoming increasingly visible, and today's students will experience many of them throughout their careers. This creates a difficult but powerful reality: we cannot separate the economy from the planet that supports it. Money will remain important. Businesses need to be financially viable, investors require returns and economies need functioning markets. But healthy soils, biodiversity, functioning ecosystems, and stable societies also have value. These things are not optional additions to the economy. They form part of the system that allows an economy to exist in the first place.

As environmental pressures become increasingly difficult to ignore, Eva expects our understanding of value to move closer to this reality.

“There is only one Earth, and it is our future that will be affected.”

What would success look like?

For Eva, the ultimate ambition extends beyond changing university curricula. Education is an important starting point because today's students will become tomorrow's managers, entrepreneurs, investors and policymakers. But transforming how society understands value also requires change among the institutions that control capital.

When asked what would make this broader movement a success, her ambition is clear:

“I hope to influence major investors and banks to apply integrated value thinking.”

That would mean moving away from the dominance of financial value as the primary measure of success. Financial returns would not disappear, but ecological and social value would increasingly become part of how we determine whether an investment, company or project is genuinely creating value. Perhaps this is ultimately the most important question raised by Integrated Value. Not whether financial value should disappear, it shouldn't, but whether we have allowed one form of value to become so dominant that we have forgotten everything that makes that value possible.

The future of business may therefore depend less on finding a perfect formula for monetising everything around us and more on learning to recognise the different forms of value that have always been there.

Acknowledgements

We would like to sincerely thank Eva Rood for sharing her time, experience and perspective on the future of value creation. Her work at Rotterdam School of Management demonstrates the important role education can play in challenging established assumptions and preparing future leaders to think beyond financial value alone. Creating a more sustainable economy will require academics, businesses, investors and individuals to learn from one another and, importantly, to remain open to different perspectives on what value means. If you would like to learn more, feel free to connect with Eva Rood on LinkedIn and continue the conversation. And we would love to hear your perspective too.

Next articleIntegrated Value: What Is a Company Really Worth?

In August 2026, Meta agreed to introduce stricter protections for users under 18 on Facebook and Instagram and to make payments that could reach approximately $18 billion over ten years . The agreement followed litigation in which US states alleged that the company had designed features that encouraged compulsive use among children and teenagers and contributed to problems including depression, disordered eating and suicide. Meta denied the allegations and admitted no wrongdoing. The new measures include default daily time limits, restrictions on overnight use and greater control over personalised feeds . In early September 2026, Meta was valued by financial markets at approximately $1.6 trillion . Yet the settlement draws attention to the effects of Meta’s platforms on people, beyond the financial value investors assign to the business. Social media can help young people maintain relationships, find support and pursue creative interests; some forms of use and platform design are also associated with harmful comparisons, disrupted sleep and harassment . These benefits and costs form part of the value created or destroyed through Meta’s activities, even when they are not fully reflected in the company’s accounts or market valuation. The Meta case therefore raises the question at the heart of this article: what is a company worth when the value it creates for investors and users coexists with consequences borne elsewhere? Integrated value broadens the assessment by placing estimates of those social and environmental benefits and costs alongside financial value. Doing so requires judgements about which consequences count, how they can be measured and priced, and how responsibility is allocated. Financial accounts record the revenue a company earns, the costs it incurs and its assets and liabilities. Investors use this information, alongside expectations about future cash flows, to value the company. Because these measures influence how companies are compared and where capital is allocated, they do more than describe performance: they also help define what counts as corporate success . The distinction raised by Meta extends well beyond social media: companies routinely create costs and benefits that are borne or enjoyed by others. When these effects are not fully reflected in market transactions or financial accounts, economists call them externalities . A factory may pay for its labour, energy and materials while surrounding communities bear the health costs of its pollution. Research undertaken by a company may, by contrast, generate knowledge that benefits other businesses and society without producing additional income for the company. Integrated value is an assessment of a company that combines its conventional financial value with estimates of the social and environmental value created or destroyed through its activities: Financial value (FV) is the conventional financial assessment of a company, representing its value to its providers of capital . Social value (SV) captures the positive and negative effects of a company's activities on people’s wellbeing and society, including employees, consumers, supply-chain workers and communities. Positive effects may include employment and consumer wellbeing, improved health, and training and knowledge spillovers. Negative effects may include underpayment, unsafe working conditions, data breaches and health harms linked to products . Environmental value (EV) captures effects on natural systems across the company's operations and value chain. Positive effects may include land restoration or avoided emissions. Negative effects may include greenhouse-gas emissions, air and water pollution, soil degradation, waste and biodiversity loss . These three forms of value do not necessarily move together. Meta expects to recognise a legal expense related to the settlement, but that accounting charge does not measure the benefits its platforms provide or the harms alleged by the states . An integrated value perspective asks how those wider consequences should be considered alongside financial performance, including who experiences them and how responsibility should be shared. Many social and environmental effects are not traded in markets and therefore have no observable price. To include them alongside financial value, an assessment would have to assign a monetary estimate known as a shadow price. It is not a price someone has paid; it represents a cost or benefit that the market transaction leaves out . Turning a social or environmental effect into a monetary estimate can be summarised in three steps . First, the assessment defines its scope by determining which effects are material because of their scale, severity or relevance to the company’s activities. Second, it establishes a baseline: what would likely have occurred without the company’s activity. The change relative to that baseline is then quantified in an appropriate unit, such as tonnes of CO₂ equivalent emitted or years of healthy life gained or lost. Third, a shadow price is assigned to each unit, for example, euros per tonne of CO₂ equivalent. Multiplying the number of units by this price produces the total monetary value assigned to the effect . Once an effect has been measured, its shadow price can be estimated in several ways. A damage-based approach values consequences such as treatment costs, lost working days, increased health risks or the loss of ecosystem services . An abatement price looks instead at what it would cost to prevent or reduce the harm, or to meet an agreed target; for carbon, this might be the cost of avoiding one additional tonne of emissions. Restoration-based prices estimate the cost of repairing damage or replacing lost services, while compensation-based prices estimate what would be required to compensate those who bear losses that cannot be prevented or repaired . These approaches answer different questions, which is why they can produce substantially different prices without necessarily contradicting one another. A shadow price is therefore not the single ‘true’ price of an externality, but an estimate whose meaning depends on the purpose, evidence and assumptions behind it . The idea of assigning a price to nature or human wellbeing understandably creates resistance. Can the loss of a tree, a species or a healthy year of life really be reduced to a monetary figure? Consider one square kilometre of forest. An assessment might quantify the carbon it captures, its contribution to water storage and purification, its recreational or aesthetic value, and the habitat it provides for other species . For Indigenous Peoples and local communities who live with and depend on the land, the same forest may sustain livelihoods and the transmission of knowledge between generations, while also forming part of cultural identity and spiritual and social relationships to place. The significance of these relationships extends beyond the benefits the forest provides and cannot be fully represented by a monetary estimate . A shadow price can nevertheless estimate some of the monetary consequences of a defined change, such as income lost when forest-based livelihoods are disrupted or the cost of replacing water storage and purification. This allows those consequences to enter the calculation without treating the resulting figure as the forest’s complete worth . An assessment should therefore distinguish between values that have been monetised and those considered in other ways, while making clear whose perspectives shaped those choices. Returning to the recent Meta case, a further challenge emerges when attempting to estimate its social value: the effects of Facebook and Instagram are distributed unevenly across users . Some may benefit from connection, self-expression and access to information, while others may be more exposed to harmful content, disrupted sleep or damaging social comparisons. These outcomes vary with users’ circumstances, vulnerabilities and patterns of use. An aggregate estimate could therefore allow benefits experienced by one group to numerically offset severe harms experienced by another, concealing who gained and who ultimately bore the cost. Bringing these outcomes into an integrated value assessment requires more than identifying them. The assessment would first have to establish how much can be attributed to Meta. Social media use and mental health may influence one another: young people already experiencing difficulties may use platforms differently, while certain forms of use may compound those difficulties. The relevant comparison would also have to consider what would probably have happened if the users had not used Facebook or Instagram, including whether they would instead have used another platform. A company-level assessment would therefore require evidence showing which users encounter particular features, how their outcomes change and what would probably have happened otherwise. Much of the data needed to answer those questions is held by Meta itself . Only after estimating the effects associated with Meta could the assessment assign monetary values and determine the company’s share of responsibility. Until then, a single estimate of Meta’s social value would depend heavily on assumptions about distribution, causation and attribution. This does not make the effects irrelevant to an assessment of the company. It shows the distance that remains between recognising these consequences and pricing them defensibly at company level. A final number does not necessarily remove the uncertainty encountered in the Meta case; it records how a methodology has dealt with it. The DAX–AEX Futureproof Index gives Heineken a financial value of €53.5 billion but an integrated value of negative €64.7 billion . Within the assessment, the company receives €64.5 billion in positive social value for consumer wellbeing, while its largest deduction is €170.9 billion for alcohol-related social costs. The same commercial activity therefore creates benefits for consumers while generating costs elsewhere in society. The €170.9 billion figure begins with an estimate of the harm associated with the alcohol Heineken sells, rather than the amount for which the company is considered responsible. Because no comparable global estimate was available, the methodology drew on studies from the United States and the Netherlands covering healthcare, lost productivity, accidents and crime. It converted these findings into regional costs per litre of beer and applied them to Heineken’s global beer production in each region, producing an initial annual social cost of €61.7 billion . The methodology then narrows that figure. Drawing on research that attributes roughly three-quarters of alcohol-related societal costs to binge drinking, it excludes this share on the basis of Heineken’s efforts to promote responsible consumption . It makes a further reduction for alcohol-free products and assigns half of the remaining cost to Heineken as the producer. The annual amount attributed to the company consequently falls to €7.32 billion. Projecting the cost into the future and discounting it to its value today produces the €170.9 billion included in Heineken’s integrated value . The main calculation retains 25% of the initial estimate after excluding costs associated with binge drinking. If it retained 12.5% instead, the present-value cost attributed to Heineken would fall to approximately €85.5 billion and its integrated value would shift from negative €64.7 billion to positive €20.8 billion. Nothing about the estimated harm to society has changed; only the share allocated to Heineken is different. Whether the company's integrated value is positive or negative therefore depends as much on how responsibility is allocated as on the estimate of the harm itself . The Heineken case shows the importance of broadening how value is measured. Crediting the company for consumer wellbeing while deducting environmental impacts and a share of alcohol-related social costs does more than produce a final number. It shows where value is actually being created and destroyed across the business, and who is bearing the cost. Conventional financial accounts capture only part of that picture. That gap is exactly what integrated value is designed to close. The importance of measuring these effects lies in how this information can influence investment decisions and company performance. When social and environmental costs and benefits are not fully reflected in financial accounts or market valuations, managers, investors and lenders are working with an incomplete picture of company performance. Making those effects visible could support managers to identify where current profits rely on costs borne by others and compare existing activities with alternatives that reduce harm or create wider benefits. Investors and lenders can examine how returns are generated, whether external costs could later become financial liabilities through litigation or regulation, and which companies are better positioned to manage them . If these measures become more widely used, they could also change which companies and activities are rewarded. Companies that reduce emissions, improve working conditions or design safer products could become more attractive to investors and lenders, even when some of those benefits do not immediately appear in profits. Companies that continue to shift substantial costs onto others would be harder to assess as successful on the basis of financial performance alone. Measurement alone cannot guarantee better outcomes, but it can strengthen the incentives for companies to take responsibility for the consequences of their activities, reduce harm and invest in improvements to social and environmental wellbeing . What, then, is a company really worth? The cases examined here show why no valuation answers that question from a neutral standpoint. For Meta, the available evidence identifies possible benefits and harms but does not yet support a robust company-level estimate of social value. For Heineken, a final number has been produced, yet its sign changes when one assumption about responsibility is altered. Integrated value brings a wider range of consequences into view, but it cannot remove the choices involved in deciding what counts, how it is measured and whose perspective is represented. The articles that follow examine three ways these wider consequences connect back to the company: when social or environmental harm becomes legal or financial exposure; why investments that create benefits over decades may appear unattractive when judged against short-term returns; and how a company’s wider impact shapes its ability to attract and retain people. That is the shift integrated value asks for: the next time a strategy, an investment or a company appears profitable, ask what it costs elsewhere, and who is paying for it. Asking the question earlier means those costs can be reduced, shared more fairly, or avoided altogether. It's how the same activity that creates a return for shareholders can also create a better outcome for everyone else impacted by it. Shall we?

2026-09-08

Integrated Value: What Is a Company Really Worth?

Next articleThe Outside World Content Hub: Resilience

We built a world optimized for a stability that no longer exists. Crises are no longer temporary interruptions to an otherwise orderly status quo; they are the permanent context in which organizations and institutions must operate. What if we stopped treating disruption as an event to simply absorb and survive, and started treating it as valuable information about a design flaw in our systems? In the second trimester of The Outside World, we explored the theme of Resilience across nine distinct articles. From the geopolitics of chokepoints and critical raw materials to the fragilities embedded in care systems, food supply chains, and social cohesion, we gathered our key takeaways into our latest content hub. Explore how true resilience isn't merely about bouncing back, but rather the courage to redesign what broke into something structurally better. Explore the Resilience Content Hub at www.resilience.ftrprf.com

2026-09-21

The Outside World Content Hub: Resilience

Rethinking What We Value in Business and Society