Inequality, exclusion, poverty and the climate crisis are just a few examples of the global challenges we are currently facing and which make it clear that no single sector of society can solve on its own. The Sustainable Development Goals will not be achieved if companies, organizations and States do not commit to them.

In this scenario, how to change the impact and transform people’s lives globally, what are the limits to scale solutions, how to measure and evaluate the work being done, and what kind of collaborations are needed to meet these challenges, were the focus of the discussion: Successful tools to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals organized by La República, Alianza Empresarial para el Desarrollo (AED), VIVA Idea, the VIVA Idea Schmidheiny Chair in Sustainability of INCAE Business School and FIFCO.

Eight years after the fulfillment of the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations 2030 Agenda, recent events such as the pandemic, represented significant setbacks in the achievement of these goals.

The forum was attended by Ethel Maldonado, Coordinator of Sustainable Business Management at AED; Roberto Artavia, President of VIVA Idea and INCAE; Urs Jäger, Executive Director of VIVA Idea and associate professor at INCAE; Jaime García, Regional Director of Social Progress Imperative; Gabriela Lucke, Director of the Center for Inclusive and Sustainable Leadership (CELIS) of INCAE; and Cristina Calvo, Director of the Acceleration Program of Entrepreneurs’ Organization Costa Rica, presented the theme of the event that kept an interested audience connected for almost two hours.

The challenge then, is to build the roadmap for this to become a reality no matter where the actors are and in turn identify how to contribute and create these opportunities through the businesses themselves.

Just as there are “unicorn” companies that reach a value of one billion dollars to benefit millions of people in an accelerated manner, there are “impact unicorns” that are collective initiatives that provide scalable solutions for billions of beneficiaries in less time and work under three key instruments: technology, market and references to evaluate.

The experiences of the Social Progress Imperative, the Center for Inclusive and Sustainable Leadership (CELIS) of INCAE Business School and the Entrepreneurs’ Organization Acceleration Program in Costa Rica were presented at the forum. All three are experiences where successful tools are applied to address current and future challenges in a scalable way to impact as many people as possible towards a better development.

Roberto Artavia, president of VIVA Idea, concluded that “in the search for solutions, the convergence of different sectors is necessary, leveraging each other and with the understanding that resources and capacities alone are not enough to address current challenges. For this to happen, we need new ways of measuring reality and working together.