change the world

The 50 companies chosen for this year's Change the World list hail from 18 countries. Use our interactive map to see how the corporations doing good by way of big business are spread out across the globe.

Mapping the World Changers

Erika Fry

A Softbank-backed pharmacy startup is working to tackle a $300-billion-a-year prescription drug crisis

Rishi Agarwal

Chirlie Felix

Laura Tilghman

Companies that focus on the human impact of the climate crisis can turn risks into opportunities&nbsp;

Matthew Heimer

Small companies, big impact: Why startups loom large on the Fortune Change the World list this year

Vivienne Walt

'It would be very hard to fight us': How Ma Jun and IPE became the corporate world's go-to pollution trackers

More companies than ever are using the profit motive to solve a multitude of societal problems. Here’s our third annual list of the best of them. <a href="http://fortune.com/2017/09/07/change-the-world-money/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Click here</a> to read more about the list and how we choose the companies. <a href="http://fortune.com/2017/09/07/change-the-world-ones-to-watch/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Click here</a> to meet six small companies that are rising stars for social good. And <a href="http://fortune.com/2017/09/07/change-the-world-social-impact/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">click here</a> to learn why more CEOs want to make a social impact.

America’s biggest bank designs a blueprint for urban economic revival.
Bank profits don’t grow when the economy stalls. And ­JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie ­Dimon and his colleagues believe U.S. GDP growth won’t be robust again unless the country does more to revitalize cities hobbled by lost manufacturing jobs. That’s one reason America’s largest bank is now steering some $250 million annually into community-building investments like small-business development, job-skills training, and neighborhood revitalization, and deploying a “service corps” of advisers to help those investments bear fruit. In Detroit, its efforts have created some 1,700 jobs and seeded more than 100 new businesses since 2014; this fall, the bank will expand the model to multiple cities. The endgame: A virtuous cycle where healthier cities breed healthier businesses—in other words, an ideal climate for the banking industry.
<a href="http://fortune.com/2017/09/07/jp-morgan-chase-detroit-revival/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Click here</a> to read more about JPMorgan Chase's efforts in Detroit.

JPMorgan Chase

A food-science company takes the fight against malnutrition to famine’s front lines.
This year, as decimating famine threatens 20 million lives in Africa and the Middle East, DSM is on the front lines; the fortified-nutrition products it helped the World Food Programme develop reach approximately 31 million people every year. The company is working on longer-term ways to eliminate hunger and malnutrition too: Take African Improved Foods, its creatively-financed joint venture with the Rwandan government and development agencies, aimed at boosting the local food-processing industry. AIF’s Kigali-based plant, which produces fortified cereal—much of it for WFP—is operated by East Africans, and its cereals are made with locally-grown maize and soybeans procured from 7,500 smallholder farmers.

Serving health, education, and the climate with some of the world’s most popular products.
With roughly a billion of its smartphones, computers, and other gadgets in circulation, ­Apple has a larger cultural footprint than any other tech company. In an interview with Fortune executive editor Adam Lashinsky, featured in this month's issue of Fortune, [hotlink]Apple[/hotlink] CEO Tim Cook makes the case that those products are intrinsically a force for good—from the process of their construction (Apple runs its own facilities overwhelmingly on renewable energy), to their potential as a tool for medical research, to the 2 million U.S. jobs Apple believes it creates through its “app economy.” The value of this $815 billion company, in other words, goes far beyond its market cap.

Apple

Finding the right balance between a potent drug pipeline and people-friendly pricing.
Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis has made waves with a drug pipeline that includes one of the most talked-about experimental cancer therapies in recent years—a treatment called Kymriah that reconfigures the body’s own immune cells to become aggressive blood-cancer killers. Kymriah just won a milestone FDA approval to become the first drug in its class.
Innovation comes in many forms, and the company has shown a willingness to apply this same creativity to its drug pricing structure, adhering to the philosophy that medicines should be judged on their worth. The company’s access initiatives in developing nations reflect one aspect of that thinking: Novartis offers treatments for deadly chronic illnesses at $1 per treatment per month to governments and public-sector customers in poor countries, as well as education and screenings in places like India, Kenya, and Vietnam.
Novartis has also set out to change how the biopharma industry and governments approach drug pricing and development. Its Sandoz unit was the first to win U.S. approval of a “biosimilar” drug—a treatment that’s the cheaper generic equivalent of some of the world’s most expensive therapies. Novartis has several more biosimilars marketed in other countries (as well as an FDA approved copycat of Amgen’s bestselling treatment Enbrel, which hasn’t reached the U.S. yet due to patent spats), and three others in late-stage clinical development.
CEO Joe Jimenez, who recently announced that he would retire next year, is also cochair for a global “value-based pricing” project that wants to figure out how to best match health care costs with patient outcomes. For Novartis, it’s not just a theoretical concept. In the case of Kymriah, the company will get reimbursements only if patients respond to treatment within a month.

Novartis

Building financial safety nets in Asia and Africa.
In 2008, this private equity firm launched a $135 million social-impact investing fund aimed at emerging markets in Asia and Africa. Today, the firm’s 17 portfolio companies reach 111 million people—more than 80% of them in low income brackets—with financial and health services that are hard to access in their home countries. Among the LeapFrog stars: South Africa’s AllLife, the first company to offer life insurance coverage to HIV-positive individuals, and Petra, the largest independent pension trustee in Ghana.

LeapFrog Investments

A tree-planting app inspires earth-friendly habits.
There are apps for tracking your calorie intake, so why not for your carbon footprint? Ant Financial’s Ant Forest app has lured 450 million users in China to do just that, in fulfillment of parent Alibaba Group’s pledge to use financial technology to tackle climate change. Users earn points toward planting virtual trees by adopting earth-friendly habits. The company plants a real tree for every 17.9 kg of carbon saved: Over 8 million will be planted in 2017. And the engagement keeps customers loyal to Ant’s widely used payment app.

Ant Financial

The nation’s biggest retailer flexes its muscles to make its supply chain greener.
Walmart is using its mammoth clout as the nation’s largest retailer to push its tens of thousands of suppliers to gradually get rid of controversial chemicals, like the formaldehyde in wood resin–based products in about 90,000 household items. And the move has inspired competitors, including [hotlink]Target[/hotlink], to also make similar efforts. So far, [hotlink]Walmart[/hotlink] says, its suppliers have removed almost all of the priority chemicals from the products it sells.
The changes are a logical extension of Walmart’s ­longer-term sustainability campaign. As of last count, the retailer was successfully diverting 82% of materials that used to be considered waste away from landfills, compared with 64% just a few years ago. And green-­consciousness isn’t incompatible with success: These initiatives haven’t ­prevented the retailer from racking up three years in a row of growing U.S. comparable sales. The planet-­conscious push is also undoubtedly helpful at a time when Walmart is looking to broaden its customer base, particularly among environmentally focused ­millennials.

Walmart

One of the world’s biggest auto­makers leads the charge for a zero-emissions vehicle.
Tesla may have made electric motors cool, but Toyota made them ubiquitous. Toyota’s Prius sedans are not only the best selling gas-electric hybrid car globally, they also “normalized” a climate-friendly technology that gearheads once viewed with distrust. Toyota has now sold more than 10 million hybrids worldwide.
Now, the automaker is pushing the envelope again, with the first mass-produced fuel-cell vehicle, a zero-emissions car called the Mirai. There are only 39 hydrogen charging stations in the U.S.. But Toyota is helping spur infrastructure development for the Mirai, an effort that happily means helping along fuel-cell technology in general. It’s making its patents royalty-free until 2020 for researchers working on advancing the technology for other purposes. So far, 2,000 of the cars have sold globally, and the numbers are accelerating. 
Up next: Toyota is developing solid-state batteries, an elusive holy grail that could radically improve range and safety for electric cars. Toyota says it has plans to commercialize the technology by the early 2020s. Fossil fuels have never looked so prehistoric.

Toyota Motor

Expanding prenatal and early childhood care in India.
Sometimes, a low-tech cell phone can be a literal lifeline—especially if you live somewhere where regular Internet and health care access is a luxury.
That’s why global conglomerate [hotlink]Johnson &amp; Johnson[/hotlink], in conjunction with the nonprofit group ARMMAN and the J&amp;J parent support arm BabyCenter, launched the “mMitra” program in India. Roughly translating to “mobile friend,” mMitra is a free service that sends pregnant women and new moms in India voice messages that give them health updates and helpful information about raising children. This might include data about preventive care, proper nutrition, and other early-childhood health issues (all delivered in local languages and dialects).
The service is especially useful because even low-income families in the country have at least one mobile device that they share. More than 700,000 Indian women have participated since the project launched in 2014, according to J&amp;J. 
<a href="https://content.fortune.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/jnj_maternity.png"><img class="alignnone wp-image-2144400 size-full" src="https://content.fortune.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/jnj_maternity.png" alt="" width="1024" height="522" /></a>

Johnson & Johnson

A fertilizer maker helps Tanzania’s subsistence farmers make the most of their land.
The Norwegian fertilizer company has been lauded for seeding a green revolution in Tanzania. The firm played a lead role in the conception of SAGCOT, an ambitious public-private partnership dedicated to revitalizing a 300,000-square-kilometer band of arable but underproductive land—a tract about the size of Italy—and boosting the incomes of the smallholder farmers whose livelihoods depend on it. Yara has leaned into the new market, selling fertilizer, of course, but also offering agricultural training; participating farmers have seen their yields increase tenfold in most cases. The firm, which also built a $20 million fertilizer terminal in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s largest city, is growing with them; it now commands close to a 50% market share in the country.

Change the World

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