The Community Value Chain

The ecosystem view recognizes that value is generated by individual enterprises and how these enterprises interact to create incremental value. To understand the systematic value of the active economy, it is essential to disaggregate the ecosystem into discrete but interdependent building blocks. Together, these building blocks form a community value chain.

The Anchor: Community Prosperity

This value chain is anchored to a four-quadrant model of community prosperity:

Economic Prosperity: This includes measures of economic activity at both an individual and community level.

Human Prosperity: This includes an individual’s real and perceived skills, knowledge, and mental and physical health, such as life expectancy, health, and wellness.

Social Prosperity: This is a multi-dimensional concept that examines the value of the collective community to an individual. Examples of measures include both behavioural (e.g. voting, volunteering) and perceptional (e.g. perceived trust, safety).

Environmental Prosperity: This includes measures associated with the health and sustainability of a community’s natural resources, such as air quality and waste management.

Community Input Resources

Community input resources are the essential enablers of the active economy. Developing enterprises in the ecosystem and their activities depend on a combination of five community input resources: Human, Economic, Social, Natural, and Built. Therefore, the ultimate impact of the active economy on community prosperity can be mapped back to the interaction of these five resources.

Activities

Activities comprise the enterprises and production processes that combine two or more community input resources. For example, it may take human resources (e.g., skills and experience), economic resources (e.g., funding), and built resources (e.g., a skateboard park) to develop and operate a program that offers free skateboard lessons for youth at risk.

Outputs

Outputs are the tangible and intangible products, services, or experiences enterprises and their processes generate. For example, the outputs generated by the above-mentioned skateboard program may range from new friends and new skills.