Operating a successful social enterprise requires providing meaningful economics to people, in both income and personal worth. In this audio lecture, Daniel Spitzer, founder of Mountain Hazelnuts, describes his experience in applying specific approaches to supply chains and value-creating tools to develop a successful hazelnut farming social enterprise in Bhutan. In this podcast episode of Stanford University’s Social Innovation Conversations, Spitzer details how he enhances supply chains through corporate citizenship and leverages data of all kinds captured from Android phones with specialized apps. From his hands-on experience dealing with supply chains, Spitzer describes why there is nothing is more important than people in operating a profitable business that delivers value to all stakeholders through corporate social responsibility.
Daniel Spitzer is Chairman & CEO of Mountain Hazelnuts Group. Daniel has spent most of the past twenty years as Chairman and/or CEO of companies in Asia. Daniel founded several ventures that have successfully combined financial objectives with social and environmental goals, including Plantation Timber Products Group (PTP), which he built into China’s largest sustainable forestry company. PTP established US $200 million of new facilities to process logs grown by 700,000 farmers in the interior of China. Daniel spent the first ten years of his career in finance, and was Managing Director of a global merchant bank and Partner & Managing Director of a major private investment fund. He received his Bachelor’s degree from University of California, Berkeley and his Master’s from Stanford University.