This article was originally published in Innovators Magazine on March 27, 2025.

By Caitlyn Chen, Vice President and Head of Sustainable Social Value (SSV) at Tencent

With only five years remaining to implement the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – a roadmap to create a better future — time is running out fast. Urgent action is needed across all sectors to tackle interconnected social challenges.

For corporations, in particular, there are growing expectations that while business goals are important, a company looking to unlock growth, resilience, and its full potential should integrate social innovation into its corporate strategy to become a real force for good.

Harnessing Technology to Uplift People and the Planet

It’s a goal we’ve long worked towards at Tencent. Realizing that our innovations for consumers and partners can be applied to advance social development, we adopted “Tech for Good” as our guiding mission in 2018. Then in 2021, we established a dedicated Sustainable Social Value (SSV) organization as an engine to implement that fundamental vision. By integrating social value into our products, services, and culture, we’re leveraging our technological and business capabilities to bridge gaps, remove barriers, and improve people’s lives and the planet.

But what does this look like in practice for a company like ours? Here are some examples.

1. Small Actions, Big Impact

When it comes to social innovation, sometimes small steps are best to break down barriers and build trust.

Our flagship communication app, Weixin in China and WeChat internationally, makes staying in touch, sharing moments, and paying for things easy, safe, and fun. Connecting over a billion people, it is also a platform that can drive real social good.

Sensing strong user support for charitable causes and understanding the barriers that exist to giving, we’ve developed tools on Weixin that make it simple for users to donate to charities, even very small amounts, while ensuring donations are well spent and that fast, transparent feedback – essential to building trust – is provided.

Let me share a story that brings this to life. A Weixin user donated one cent to a meal fund for sanitation workers. Three days later, he received a notification that his donation, pooled with others, had provided a hot lunch to a sanitation worker in his city. Encouraged, he donated again, this time a larger amount.

Over the past 10 years, small acts of kindness like this have added up to over RMB 30 billion (USD 4 billion) to support tens of thousands of charity projects in healthcare, children’s safety, education, and more. This coincides with an increase of about four times in the proportion of people who donated money in the past decade in China, a journey we’re excited to be part of.

2. A Life-Saving Network

The best way to make a difference is to work strategically with others, leveraging our respective expertise to amplify progress.

Weixin’s power of connection and real-time communication can be very helpful in health emergencies like cardiac arrests, where timely coordination and action are critical to saving lives. How can we systematically maximize its potential in these urgent scenarios?

We’ve collaborated with local hospitals and emergency helplines – in China, people dial 120 – to build a rescue network that can act within minutes. This system ensures seamless communication across emergency responders, maps nearby Automated External Defibrillators (AEDs), and even enables bystanders to act as first responders.

We’ve seen this in action in cities like Dongguan, where a man collapsed at work, but the nearest ambulance was 16 minutes away. When a colleague called 120, dispatchers sent a text message linking the caller to a Weixin video call with a doctor, who guided the team through live video to restore the man’s heartbeat and breathing before the ambulance arrived.

This network has already saved hundreds of lives in pilot cities, raising survival rates from merely two percent to 17 percent.

3. Cross-Sector Ecosystem for Innovation

Addressing complex societal challenges requires open and collaborative ecosystems where expertise, resources, and vision align to drive systemic impact.

Beyond technology, corporations like ours can accelerate progress towards the SDGs by leveraging our business know-how, cross-sector connections, and market-tested experience to empower innovators tackling urgent global challenges.

Consider climate action: Our CarbonX Program, launched with partners across sectors, supports low-carbon technology innovators to scale at a pace needed for the world to achieve net zero by 2050. Winning teams gain not only catalytic funding, but also academic mentorship, real-world pilot opportunities, and critical market insights through a feedback loop involving investors and industry leaders. Now in its second phase, CarbonX is expanding its reach, inviting global innovators to test their research beyond the lab.

By fostering ecosystems uniting corporations, investors, academia, startups, and more, we can bridge gaps between sectors and amplify high-impact solutions with coordinated actions.

If You Want to Walk Far, Walk Together

While technology offers powerful tools, it’s the shared goals and collaboration with partners that unleash our full potential.

To ensure our efforts create meaningful change, we developed the SQI framework (Scale, Quality, Impact) to guide every initiative. In pilot phases, we prioritize quality, focusing on tangible improvements for beneficiaries and refining our problem-solving efficiency. As solutions mature, we ensure they stay effective and scalable.

Collaboration fuels this progress. At events like the 2024 Sustainable Social Value Innovation Summit, and the World Economic Forum in Davos, we’ve witnessed the exponential power of collective action—the Schwab Foundation’s global community of nearly 500 social entrepreneurs and innovators, for instance, has already positively impacted 931 million lives.

The road ahead is long, but it is one we walk together. We will continue leveraging our technologies and business expertise to empower individuals, communities, and organizations to achieve more. Because goodwill grows possibilities, and together, we can turn them into realities.