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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ChainReact (Making Supplier Networks Transparent, Understandable and Responsive)

Teaser

The ChainReact project is “an effort to make supply networks transparent, understandable, and responsive, so that companies and their stakeholders can see, react to, and ultimately transform corporate network impacts”. At the heart of ChainReact’s strategy is the aim to...

Summary

The ChainReact project is “an effort to make supply networks transparent, understandable, and responsive, so that companies and their stakeholders can see, react to, and ultimately transform corporate network impacts”. At the heart of ChainReact’s strategy is the aim to provide a data ecosystem that brings together the efforts of the many actors working on related challenges, offering a more synergistic and coherent approach for organisations that share common goals. To put this succinctly, ChainReact’s strategy for achieving its high-level goals is chiefly to facilitate the work of other organisations, those that bring significant expertise and resources to bear in addressing challenges related to corporate networks. And by addressing those challenges, the project could potentially impact those who are directly affected by corporate behaviour, including the environment and societies where these corporations are visible and active.

The project is designed in a way that encourages corporate behavioural change by providing a platform that incentivises companies to be more transparent about their supply networks, encouraging them to ask their own supply chain to self-report sustainability data on one of the Consortium Partners’ platform: WikiRate.org. The Whistle, a University of Cambridge-based initiative and OpenCorporates each complete the triangle of the struts that, through a systematic integration process of the three platforms, will enable ChainReact to deliver on its overall objectives. The project is designed in a way that will foster collective awareness on corporate network impacts and channel that awareness to drive social change.

The project\'s overall objectives are as follows:

Objective 1: Identify irresponsible corporate activity
Objective 2: Connect issues at corporate networks’ edges to network drivers
Objective 3: Incentivise companies to address network issues

Work performed

Although supply network data are being made available by data owners, they remain difficult to access and asses, ChainReact\'s efforts to bridge the gap between tracking data using it in a meaningful way have been channelled through focusing on the project\'s three struts by harmonising methodologies that ensure integration and seamless data flow, and through promoting disclosure of information which remain a common currency withheld from the public sphere. Progress is being monitored using a SMART approach to reach the project\'s objectives, a methodology that has proven effective for continued monitoring of tasks and deliverables, while taking stock of external contributions and risk factors.

The following will highlight work performed by the consortium partners from the beginning of the project to the current reporting period (m18):

ChainReact reports significant progress regarding The Whistle (previously branded as \'Talk Free\'). The Whistle aims to connect civilian witness reporters directly to relevant NGOs. Its current design includes a dashboard, which facilitates handling and verification of reports by NGO representatives. Moreover, preparations for the first reporting campaign are well under way, with the first campaign to be launched in Q7. The Whistle team completed a set of 30 interviews with NGO representatives who may be potential partners regarding the reporting campaigns. (More detail found in the technical report)

In order to keep momentum in attaining objective (2), it was necessary to initiate two distinct activities; the mapping of OpenCorporates.com entities to WikiRate.org companies, and establishing foundations for the work started on corporate network mapping work packages. A significant achievement for this period was the new feature on WikiRate.org called “Relationship Metrics” which can trace relationships between different entities that have been researched. ChainReact gears towards deepening and improving corporate network mapping by engaging corporations as well. Q6 witnessed an opportunity to form a multi-stakeholder action group (MAG) to come together around disclosures in the Fashion industry.

Objective 3 introduces the concept of “network-aware” metric which does not only capture the singularity of a company\'s behaviour in its ESG performance, but also takes account of the company\'s network, its performance and behaviour. So for example, if Company A can satisfy a metric asking whether it has published a CSR report for a specific year, a network-aware metric would aim to capture whether Company A\'s suppliers have also complied with the same requirement. Network-aware metrics are one way to show a company\'s responsibility towards its own network of suppliers, and towards the community and environment.

Final results

ChainReact’s most significant advance in the state of the art of Environmental, Social and Governance data is its new generative dynamic between high-level brand metrics and low-level entity reporting via the integration of WikiRate.org and OpenCorporates. Corporate network mapping across the two platforms has been tested and successfully implemented using sophisticated algorithms and processes.

In addition, advances beyond state of the art have been also pushed for the project’s third strut The Whistle: While other attempts to develop software which facilitates gathering and verifying incident reports have been made, none of these tools offer integrated report collection with a dashboard for handling reports and incorporating tools which are used in verification. The Whistle is able to track data that has not been otherwise captured elsewhere which in return, offers a step forward in loosening \'layered\' data-capturing. Moreover, none of the other tools offer a synergistic mechanism between the different struts the way The Whistle and WikiRate are linked.

This value proposition makes ChainReact a project with potential to strike high impact for various stakeholders and with results that could be exploited, reused and adapted, notably with the developed relationship metrics and widespread accessibility of the tools and features delivered by this project. Offering the possibility for the wider community to trace data for companies and their suppliers, i.e. tier-1 suppliers, strikes for an impactful proposition that reflects major societal implications. There are several primary stakeholders to the project that can be described as drivers for impact in ChainReact: Corporations, Academics and students, NGOs and volunteers are vital for causing wider reach through collective awareness both in an educational capacity, but also through a broader diverse community. Already through WikiRate.org, there is progress towards engagement of the primary stakeholders of ChainReact, through existing collaborative work, conferences and existing projects such as the Modern Slavery Act, the collaboration with the UNGC, PRME, and others around reporting on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). ChainReact is well on track in providing the tools to enable researchers and the wider research network to fill the data gaps that are currently causing hindrance to reaching set targets towards the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Website & more info

More info: http://chainreact.org.