For the economy to thrive, mid-sized business needs to thrive. And for Andy Monshaw, the general manager of global small- and medium-sized businesses at IBM, helping those companies is his expertise. Monshaw has over 25 years of experience in the IT industry and has held several executive positions with IBM.

Check out the video to see GOOD chief community officer Max Schorr talk to Monshaw about the importance of mid-sized businesses in our economy, the role technology plays, and how IBM is helping clients accelerate their businesses.

To learn about other GOOD companies making a difference, check out the GOOD Company Project.

IBM, GOOD's partner in the search for the most innovative and responsible mid-sized companies, selected Just Born, a candy company headquartered in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, as a finalist in the GOOD Company Project.

The venerable, family-owned confectioner deluges the world in Peeps during the Easter season—and pretty much the rest of the year, too. Just Born also makes classics like Mike & Ike and Peanut Chews, but just because the company has been making candy for decades doesn't mean it isn't keeping up with the latest trends in business: It's leveraged technology and trade to expand its business around the world in the last decade, making its candy available to 1.5 billion people worldwide. Despite its global outlook, Just Born hasn't forgotten its roots, manufacturing all its candies at its Bethlehem headquarters, where it is engages the community with a comprehensive volunteer program and donations to over 150 local charities, nonprofits and schools. 

IBM, GOOD's partner in the search for the most innovative and responsible mid-sized companies, selected Music Mastermind, a music software development company headquartered in Calabasas, California, as a finalist in the GOOD Company Project.

Music Mastermind is on a mission to make everyone find their inner composer. The company is committed to developing music technology that breaks down the barrier between appreciating music and creating it. Founded in 2008 by Matt Serletic—a Grammy Award-winning producer-songwriter and former chairman and CEO of Virgin Records—and Bo Bazylevsky, former managing director and global head of emerging markets corporate bond trading at JP Morgan, the company hopes to benefit from the growing trend in user-created content. Unlike conventional music creation software, Music Mastermind’s Zya allows users to create freely without needing special training or knowledge, and uses cloud computing to makes music creation accessible on PCs, tablets, or smart phones.

Water Entertainment Technology designs water features—the nine acres of fountains at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas—or even grander, the 30-acre Dubai Fountain, the largest in the world. WET was founded by a group of former Disney Imagineers, including CEO Mark Fuller, who developed a unique “laminar-flow” nozzle as an engineering student. That nozzle is one of the innovations that make WET’s creations so unusual; others, developed in WET’s Burbank campus, include low-energy lighting, underwater robots, and even an ice fountain. The campus, which includes a newly opened “Idea Playground,” is home to the engineers, designers, choreographers, animators, and technologists whose collaborations are changing the way people think about water.

Heather Fleming is a designer and an engineer who co-founded Catapult Design, a nonprofit firm that collaborates with social entrepreneurs to ensure the products and business models they've designed to change people's lives work in practice. Fleming began her career doing product development in Silicon Valley, but transitioned into humanitarian design after working with Engineers Without Borders. 

All too often, Fleming warns, social entrepreneurs don't spend enough time considering their business from the perspective of the people who will be its customers and stakeholders, and that's no good for anyone. For new social enterprise to succeed, it will need to remember key design principles. For starters, entrepreneurs need to keep the end user at the forefront of their minds. 

Every Friday, GOOD gives you a minute of insight from an impact economy leader.

IBM, GOOD's partner in the search for the most innovative and responsible medium-sized companies, selected Finceramica, a biotech company from Faenza, Italy, as a finalist in the GOOD Company Project.

Finceramica was inspired by the traditional Italian pottery of Faenza to create a bio-ceramic that can be used as a prosthesis inside the human body. The Science and Technology Institute of Ceramics began research on the project in 1990 and later collaborated with Finceramica to develop bone implants that imitate the chemistry and structure of human bone. More than two decades later, the company is working to make these implants accessible to doctors everywhere. A new web platform allows real-time discussion between surgeons, prosthesis producers, and distributors, allowing for a highly collaborative process, plus faster production and delivery.

IBM, GOOD's partner in the search for the most innovative and responsible medium-sized companies, selected New York-based women’s apparel designer Adrianna Papell as a finalist for the GOOD Company Project. 

Founded in 1979 by Harvey Berkman, Adrianna Papell started as a dress and blouse fashion house, but now caters to women of all ages for all occasions. They’ve stayed true to traditional dressmaking techniques and craft hand-sewn dresses in-house, but they're also strategic about embracing technology to better connect with their customers. An innovative cloud-based solution from Sky IT allows Adrianna Papell to view product performance at the point of sale so they can evaluate better what styles and looks women are looking for. From this data, the company can also see how products are selling, and break down those numbers by factors including geographic location and season.

Check out the video to see how Adrianna Papell is leveraging technology to better reach fashion-savvy women.

Jason Graham-Nye has had a varied career, to say the least: He's worked as an stockbroker, a high school teacher, and a rugby coach. Now, he is the CEO and co-founder of gDiapers, a company that makes eco-friendly diapers. When Jason and his wife Kim had their first child, they discovered that traditional diapers have a big negative impact on the environment. In their native Australia, they stumbled across a kind of hybrid diaper that reduces environmental and health costs. Importing the design to the United States, the couple started their company in Portland, Oregon and quickly grew into a major force in the diaper world. Asked for advice for budding entrepreneurs, Graham-Nye highlights the importance of people: Ensuring that not just your employees, but also your investors and partners, are on board with the mission of your enterprise.

Every Friday, GOOD gives you a minute of insight from an impact economy leader.

Ian Yolles has been working in the social impact economy for years. A long-time brand and marketing manager with tours of duty at Patagonia, Nike and the apparel company Nau, Yolles is now chief sustainability officer of Recyclebank, a clean-tech firm that partners with municipalities to promote sustainability by rewarding green behavior. Asked what lessons he would share with new social entrepreneurs, Yolles focused on the personal side of running a business, the need for perseverance, and the importance of building a team of partners who are equally passionate about your enterprise.

Every Friday, GOOD gives you a minute of insight from an impact economy leader.

Sometimes, business seems too easy: Spot a need in the market, fill the gap, profit. That’s certainly how the Sweetgreen story reads. Three college friends realized they couldn’t get a quick, healthy meal near Georgetown University's Washington, D.C. campus, so they opened a healthy fast-food restaurant after graduation. Four short years later, they’re opening their 11th location.

Of course, that story belies the sleepless nights and customer-less mornings that Nic Jammet, Jonathan Neman and Nathaniel Ru faced getting their company off the ground, and the persistence they needed to convince customers, landlords, suppliers, and investors—like New York restaurateur Joe Bastianach and Honest Tea co-founder Seth Goldman—to take them seriously as fresh-from-school entrepreneurs.

Sweetgreen has thrived thanks to its brand, which the founders call the “Sweetlife.” The story of their company and its image of youth, health and hipness—leveraged by the founders’ taste in music, their commitment to eco-friendly design and sustainable practices, and their focus on locally-sourced, healthy food—has put the company on the map without breaking their marketing budget.

Of course, you can’t avoid the blocking and tackling of business: Location has something to do with their success, and Sweetgreen has capitalized on the founders’ original insight by placing locations near other colleges, including George Washington University in D.C. and the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

They do well by their employees, too, with free salads during each shift and a tenure program that recognizes employees with free t-shirts; after two years at the company, workers receive an iPod; after three, a Sweetgreen bike.

The company is also involved in the community, partnering with local schools to encourage healthy eating through nutrition education and activities like salad-making competitions. Not only are they battling childhood obesity, a growing public health concern, they’re also introducing the next generation of customers to their salads and frozen yogurt.

That’s a pretty sweet win-win.
 

Corporate culture is a weird thing: It's almost impossible to inculcate, but anyone who has worked in an office with a distinctive culture is aware of it and its contributions to their firm’s success.

72andSunny, a Los Angeles- and Amsterdam-based marketing agency, is a GOOD Company finalist because of its unique culture, so we wanted to find out how some of the most creative people in one of the most creative sectors build a work environment that allows them to thrive. The company has had success for clients that include Nike, 2K Sports, the Discovery Channel, and, as described in our insider interview, K-Swiss.

My conversation with the company’s founding partners, John Boiler and Glenn Cole, got at what’s important in their culture: Emphasizing the team over the individual by working to eliminate the ever-present ego, a commonly cited goal but one that their agency takes pains to enforce. They also insist on an non-siloed approach to operations and hiring that values employees with a broad array of skills in the firm’s various specialties, from design to copywriting to interactive. 

The company also takes culture seriously by keeping a "life coach" on staff—a director of talent and culture who helps employees at every level improve their approach to work, access training and feel invested in what’s happening around the firm. In an industry that’s been criticized for doing little to develop human capital—the main competitive resource at any communications firm—it’s an important move.

72andSunny is doubling down on this strategy by starting 72u, a seminar-cum-apprenticeship that helps develop the kind of talent the agency wants to hire. Under the guidance of agency veterans with teaching experience, the dozen or so students learn techniques, solve problems, and even work with clients to gain real-world experience while pushing the limits of modern communication.

Perhaps most importantly, the agency's leaders understands that cultures evolve. “We are a company that’s born modern,” says Matt Jarvis, the chief strategy officer. “Part of being modern is comfort with change.” That comfort has led the company to innovate in the industry through showing its leaders the implications of disruptive changes in media and technology for marketers.

“Our industry in the past has at times had the reputation of being deceptive, [and] perhaps that has been an appropriate handful at mud slung at us, but those days are over,” Jarvis says. “That just doesn’t work anymore, and I’m glad about that.”

I’m tempted to think he’s spinning me (his job, after all?) but there’s accuracy to his analysis—it’s very hard for a ad agency to lie about a company’s products with increased access to information about competitors and the greater mouthpiece given to regular people on the internet.

Today, Jarvis says, “the truth is the key to great marketing. In this day and age, with social media and gotcha journalism and Wikileaks, there is absolutely nowhere to hide. We believe in telling the truth to each other and we believe in telling the truth to the people we are trying to sell things to. Now, our job is to make it a beautiful truth, and to shine a great light on things that are true… we are great at telling stories that are truthful, and that’s why they resonate with people.”

This fall, the United States experienced the deadliest outbreak of food-borne illness in the last decade after contaminated cantaloupes spread listeria bacteria to at least 116 people across the country, killing 23. The terrible outcome underscores the need for the companies to take best possible practices around food safety.

One GOOD Company finalist, food marketing cooperative Cherry Central, has done just that, adopting a high-tech system of quality and food safety monitors to ensure that their products—which range from juices and sauces to market-ready produce—meet the highest standards. We visited Luddington, Michigan, home to a food processing plant that works closely with Cherry Central and some of the original farmers behind the cooperative, to learn more about how they ensure their customers get the best produce possible. 

Key to Cherry Central's approach is technology developed by N2N Global, which allows the company to electronically trace produce from the orchard through the various steps of transportation, storage, and processing into juice or other products, all the way down to the bottle or can. Not only does that mean that safety standards, like maintaining a safe temperature range, are constantly monitored, but also that any quality issues can be identified and dealt with on a minute-to-minute basis. 

Cherry Central's commitment to providing the best product to its customers while keeping independent growers and processors in control make them a GOOD company. 

Why do Revolution Prep's founders care so much about education? Because a college degree is a key to economic success. Americans with a bachelor's degree and higher have a 4.2 percent unemployment rate, compared to 8.4 percent unemployment for people with some college and 9.7 percent for people with only a high school diploma. 

Education is about more than personal achievement, however. It's also a key indicator of a successful economy, in which workers are more productive and earn more money. But the United States is falling behind the average education levels of developed countries and failing to increase the proportion of citizens with higher education credentials, which independent analysts say will lead to a deficit in college educated workers as soon as 2018.

Revolution Prep is making a business out of changing that. The company specializes in test prep for the SATs and ACTs—key hurdles in the college admissions process—but with an aim toward inculcating problem-solving skills, not gaming the test. Their innovative curriculum includes online and in-person learning.

Also key is the company's decision to allow students who can't afford the program to pay what they can afford. With college access problems much worse among low-income students, this socially-responsible decision helps level the playing field in college admissions.

The company's founders are now taking the lessons they learned in test prep to develop educational software for classrooms, which have long struggled to integrate technology in a way that augments teaching. Revolution Prep's software analyzes students' performance to identify their personal learning obstacles and shares that information with the teacher, who can then focus on teaching the right skills to the right students while spending less time grading. 

That's important not just because of the need to use limited resources to provide higher quality elementary education, but also because our college problem starts in the K-12 grades: Even students who gain access to higher education can fail if they aren't adequately prepared for the task at hand. 

With the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness warning that problems in education "pose fundamental threats to our future prosperity," there's no time like the present for a GOOD Company like Revolution Prep to start solving this problem. 

Cytori Therapeutics was among our first GOOD Company finalists, and for good reason: They've developed an innovative product that could make stem cell treatments a part of every physician's tool kit. Now they've deployed their flagship technology, the Cellution System, toward reconstructive surgery for women who required surgery to treat breast cancer. But Cytori's main goal has always been to attack heart disease, the number one cause of death in this country. Check out the video to learn more about the science behind Cytori, how it can improve the economy and why it's not available in the United States—yet.

The GOOD Company Project is searching for the midsize businesses that meet our high standards for innovation, creativity and sustainability—not to mention profitability—but we need your help to flesh out the criteria that will determine the 40 businesses that make it to our final list. Let us know the practices and firms that ought to make the list by leaving a comment here or by using the hashtag #GOODCo on Twitter.

This video is the first in a documentary series we'll film around the country, visiting different finalists and learning what goes on behind the scenes at a GOOD company. Keep an eye out for our latest videos right here in the weeks ahead.