Workshop — Redefining Business: From Profit-Centered to Social-Value-Creating Models

Info

Across the exhibition, visitors will encounter landscapes where nature slowly reclaims human-built environments, offering quiet reminders that regeneration is possible when conditions shift from extraction toward care. This workshop translates that insight into the economic and professional realm, inviting participants to explore what becomes possible when business is reimagined as a vehicle for solving social issues and creating social value in a financially sustainable way, instead of a profit-generating machine.

The workshop is built around a new working definition of business:

A business is an entity that solves social issues and creates social value in a financially sustainable way.

Rather than treating social impact as an add-on or moral extra, the session invites participants to explore how this definition can become the core organizing principle of their work or business idea. The focus is on hands-on reflection and redesign. Participants will explore how their values, lived experiences, and social concerns can become foundations for economically viable initiatives, rather than obstacles to financial sustainability. 

Through a combination of short inputs, guided reflection, small-group dialogue, and simple prototyping exercises, participants will:

• Identify the social issues their work already touches or could address
• Examine inherited assumptions about money, value, growth, and success
• Reframe an existing business, project, or idea through the proposed definition
• Sketch an initial business logic that aligns social value creation with financial sustainability

The emphasis is on experimentation, peer learning, and sense-making rather than arriving at fixed answers. Within the broader exhibition, this workshop serves as a bridge between seeing regeneration and practicing it, supporting participants in translating the metaphors of healing landscapes into concrete, life-embedded economic experiments.

Workshop Agenda

14:00–14:20 | Arrival & Grounding Ice-Breaker

A short, guided exercise inviting participants to reflect on:

• Why they are drawn to entrepreneurship or independent work
• What questions or tensions they carry around money, value, impact, and sustainability

This opening sets a shared, human-centered tone and connects personal motivations to the exhibition’s themes of regeneration and renewal.

14:20–15:00 | Context & Conceptual Framing

A short input introducing:

• The exhibition’s core inquiry into regeneration and healing
• The working definition of business as an entity that solves social issues and creates social value in a financially sustainable way
• Common inherited assumptions about profit, growth, scarcity, and success and how these shape business design

Concrete examples are used to ground the discussion and challenge common misconceptions (e.g. “impact means earning less” or “social value belongs outside business”).

15:00–17:00 | Group Work: Redesigning Business Through a Regenerative Lens

Participants work individually and in small groups to:

• Identify the social issues their current work or ideas already touch
• Examine invisible assumptions influencing their business thinking
• Reframe their business, project, or early-stage idea through the proposed definition
• Sketch an initial regenerative business logic that aligns social value creation with financial sustainability

The emphasis is on reflection, experimentation, and peer learning rather than polished outcomes.

17:00–18:00 | Sharing, Dialogue & Integration

• Self-selected participants share insights, tensions, and questions that emerged
• Open Q&A and collective reflection
• Closing integration connecting personal redesign processes back to the exhibition’s visual metaphors of regeneration

Participants leave with a clearer sense of direction and language for articulating their work.

Who is this for?

This workshop is designed for:

• Entrepreneurs and founders (early-stage or established)
• Freelancers and independent professionals
• People exploring or preparing to start a business or project
• Creatives, researchers, and practitioners navigating hybrid careers
• Individuals interested in social innovation, sustainability, and regenerative economic models

No prior business training is required. The workshop welcomes participants from diverse professional and cultural backgrounds who are curious about doing business differently and aligning their work with social value and meaning.

What will participants gain?

Participants will leave with an initial reframed version of their business idea or professional direction, practical tools for aligning social value creation with financial sustainability, and insights gained through peer exchange.