Why did you come up with this innovation?
"We wanted to find out how we could allocate our resources, the intelligence and expertise of people in the right way. We created a net impact model which is a new way of measuring what effect companies have on the world. Using artificial intelligence, we are going through a database of 80 million scientific articles and measuring what companies are responsible for. For example, how many illnesses or human rights violations can be traced back to the actions of a company.
Our service is meant for consumers and investors. Openness is a key theme for us. At the present moment, we have analysed 20,000 products and 1,000 companies. In the future, we want to offer this data to consumers on a larger scale. Right now, they can search for a product in our service and see its impact.
We want to challenge the idea of sustainability. For instance, if a company produces plastic spoons, it can act in a sustainable way by offering mindfulness classes for employees or using water-saving toilets, but this does not make the product itself into a sustainable one. We want to help people see the forest for the trees.”
What is the significance of your invention?
"Organisations have more power than ever before. I hope that we can challenge the grip of companies by measuring whether an organisation creates more destruction than value. What is smart for business?
Consumers easily become discouraged because they lack the tools to sort information and compare companies. Our innovation is significant because it makes it easy to act according to your values.
Companies are however not good or bad as such. We want to make the evaluation of businesses fair and transparent. The goodness of a company depends on how you measure it: if one person looks into the tax money generated by a company and another person examines climate impact, the top 10 look very different."
What does the future hold for you?
"We are a bunch of silly nerds who are strongly committed to developing our model. Our aim is to evaluate companies fairly and with precision. We also want to develop services that people can use to benefit from the findings of the model. These might includes applications that you can use in a supermarket aisle, or to guide your investments.
We are living in a phase of evolution where the old metrics of business have reached the end of their journey. We can create balance in a competitive situation where both clients and investors start to pay more attention to what companies accomplish.
Northern Europe is a very interesting region in this regard. It would be great to see Finland turning the impact evaluation of companies into a competitive advantage. What could be a better laboratory than this country? Nature conservation and equality are highly valued by Finns. I would like to see us as pioneers.
Upright is a company that measures the all-round environmental, health, societal and data production responsibility of companies. Upright was founded in October 2018. The company has funded itself by carrying out projects commissioned by other companies.
