The Situation
The Minesota State Legislature passed the Public Benefit Corporation Act in 2014. One of the key features of the Act is that companies formed under it must publish a report each year about how the public has benefitted from them.
MNPHARM launched in 2015 as a public benefit corporation. The company’s goal is to replace traditional medicine production with cleaner, safer, more sustainable, and more responsive plant-based production. They work with researchers and manufacturers to bring medicine to market. MNPHARM asked The Improve Group to help articulate its benefit and determine what data could be used to demonstrate how the public has benefitted, recognizing that the company is still developing its products.
The Solution
The Improve Group met with MNPHARM’s entrepreneurs to learn about plant-based medicine and how it can benefit the public. We worked with the company to:
- Develop a logic model that describes what MNPHARM is doing and how that will result in benefits to patients, researchers and broader public health.
- Identify data sources that can be used to measure MNPHARM’s successes. These sources needed to allow for flexibility while the company is still developing, so we settled on both product tracking (i.e., number of medicines that made it to market) and testimonials (for researchers and patients to share the impact).
The Results
With support from The Improve Group, MNPHARM knows what information it will be reporting and where that information will come from. As it continues to partner with researchers and manufacturers, MNPHARM can clearly describe its goals and intended results. MNPHARM created an investor prospectus that drew on the logic model to describe its public benefit goals.