Jutta Närhi
Niels Nielsen
Verna Vulkko
Ada Brotkin
Hanken School of Economics
Martin Fougere
Eva Nilsson
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Upright Project is a Helsinki-based technology company that measures the holistic impact of companies by metering both negative and positive impacts of them with a unique quantification model. The model is based on machine learning and the value chain relationships of all products traded in the private market (Upright Project 2022). The company has one platform that contains all impact-related data on companies in a unified and comparable format. By presenting the holistic view of companies’ impacts, The Upright Platform benefits companies, employees, and investors by bringing in transparency to ESG/impact discussion.
The Upright model online is based on a neural network summarizing 200M+ scientific articles and proprietary modeling of the economy with a taxonomy of 150,000+ possible product categories (Upright Project 2022). Each company has a profile that illustrates the net sum of negative and positive impacts of a company’s business. The profile is based on four main metrics.
As one of the main metrics, the profile displays UN SDG revenue contribution of the company. This helps stakeholders in making more sustainable business decisions. Therefore, it can be said that Upright Project contributes indirectly to all 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals.
According to Upright’s philosophy, more metrics are however needed to sum up the holistic net impact of a company as the company is aiming for the best possible solution to measure it. To complement the company profiles, Upright’s data covers three more main metrics in addition to UN SDG revenue contribution: net impact profile, EU SFDR Principal Adverse Impact indicators, and EU Taxonomy eligibility and alignment metrics. These metrics together can currently help the decision makers to make more sustainable business decisions (Upright Project 2022). All the data is live online in Upright Platform. In the future, the metrics could also benefit individual people e.g., by helping them to choose where to invest the work input of their lifetime. According to Upright, these two factors, the allocation of financial and human capital, have a crucial impact on the goals of sustainable development.
Upright Project was founded in 2017 by the CEO Annu Nieminen because she felt like the proper understanding of how all companies are holistically impacting the world was missing. “We are able to measure Co2 emissions, we are able to measure gender diversity, and these kinds of individual metrics, but there is no metric, that would tell you, what are all the gains that the company is achieving with its business, and what are all the resources used while creating those benefits.” Upright Project Clients & Growth Valtteri Vulkko sums up the thought behind the company.
For sure, it is not straightforward to have an answer to what is the holistic impact of all the companies in the world. Therefore, Vulkko explains that the philosophy of Upright has always been to provide the best possible answer to that question, with the best possible data in the world by taking advantage of machine learning and big data.
The main motivation for the company is to bring the holistic impact data to different decision makers. “All decisions in the world are made with insufficient data.”, Vulkko says and continues “Especially in sustainability and impact discussion, the proper, holistic, data is quite scarce. Our main motivation is to make this data available for the decision makers.”
The Upright Platform covers 99% of the global stock market cap, complemented by a set of the most attractive unlisted growth companies to help investors and companies to make sustainable business decisions. Since June 2021, Upright’s data has been distributed in global partnership with Nasdaq to make the net impact data easily available via Nasdaq’s API for investors and companies globally (Upright Project 2022).
The effect of investors allocating financial capital, employees allocating human capital, consumers allocating money and company leaders allocating company resources based on Upright’s data is expected to have a big impact on the future world according to Vulkko from Upright Project.
The company currently has more than 150 leading companies and investors as clients. In other words, these decision makers are already making judgements based on the Upright model. Therefore, the impacts have already started to build up. In addition, the company has raised interest in the media and has already been featured in many well-known publications both in Finland and abroad.
The greatest benefit provided by the company's solution is the visualization and quantification of the net impact of a company's activities. This goes beyond the several environmental influences of a product and also affects other categories, such as the knowledge inside the company, internal and external health aspects as well as social issues. In the "knowledge" category, for example, the infrastructure and the creation of knowledge could contribute to a positive net impact, whereas an under-distribution of this knowledge in combination with a lack of qualified human capital could have a negative impact.
According to Gary Smith, CEO of market leading compostable packaging company Biopak Pty Ltd, younger graduates in particular prefer to work in sustainable, impactful companies, which allows Upright's clients to achieve better recruitment positions in this regard (Smith 2019).
A further trend is emerging that business decisions (e.g., in relation to individual business lines or strategies in general) not only include sustainability aspects as an add-on, but also include them on an essential basis (Schweizer 2020). Upright helps their clients to identify un- or less sustainable activities which then helps to reallocate financial or human capital to other areas accordingly.
Many companies are dependent on the financing of business activities by investors, who in turn are often bound by internal regulations regarding the sustainability of the company. Upright helps to give investors (and their portfolio companies) this security by providing transparency.
The fact that Upright shows which companies act in a particularly sustainable manner and thus provides investors with better recommendations for action ultimately also benefits society, as more will then be invested in these companies. In addition, the analysis of their own business activities helps companies to explore the respective areas in order to improve them.
A particular highlight of the solution is its universal applicability. While certain other enhancements rely on local restrictions, such as laws or environmental conditions, Upright offers a data-based approach that can be extended to multiple countries. As a result, profound and real positive changes can be achieved that could affect the whole world instead of just symbolic changes like a law against plastic straws.
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Upright Project is a Helsinki-based technology company that measures the holistic impact of companies by metering both negative and positive impacts of them with a unique quantification model. By presenting the holistic view of companies’ impacts, The Upright Project benefits companies, employees, and investors by bringing in transparency to ESG/impact discussion.