On November 11, 2019, Tencent officially adopted "user-oriented, technology for good" as the company's mission and vision.
So far, more than 1000 days.
If we trace the starting point of our internal thinking and "technology for good", this timeline will stretch forward a lot.
The path of practice, reflection, and re-practice, and exploring social values is extended every day, and stories of good, large and small, occur every day.
Recently, Tencent's sustainable social value annual magazine "Care" reviewed these stories, and Ma Huateng wrote his latest thoughts.
He shared the story of a former employee, an elderly man and a scientist as examples. He said that what they do is very different, from helping neighbors, villages, children, to dealing with global warming glacier protection, the starting point is simple, even instinctive, this emotion, is "care". This "care" is the foundation for social values to co-create a more low-level, soft and strong human nature.
"In the past, I said that Tencent is a connector, and I think more from the tool level." Ma Huateng said, "With the deepening of the exploration of social values, we see that the essence of connection is beyond tools, and this essence is to care for people. ”
"With this perspective, we can rediscover products and technologies and expand more application scenarios to solve social problems."
The following are Ma Huateng's latest thoughts on "Technology for Good":
A few months ago, the United Nations released the human development report "Uncertain Times, Unstable Life", which believes that under the influence of global epidemic, climate warming, geopolitics and other factors, mankind has faced a new complex of uncertainty that has never been seen in history.
However, at times like these, I hear some warm and definite stories that external uncertainty has not really affected them, and they are still on the move, holding on to their goals and bringing hope.
One
The first story is about a former Tencent employee who left many years ago.
His name is Gold, and he once wrote me a letter as a former employee about leaving Tencent to return to his hometown to start a business, in order to repay the villagers he helped when his family was at its poorest. Touched by his original intention, we donated a fee to him after verifying the situation.
Last year, he also became a student of Tencent's "Rural CEO" charity program, learning with 50 rural entrepreneurs from all over the world. Now, he leads a cooperative that is recognized by the villagers and the government.
Gold's emotion is: "In the past few years, it has really come out step by step, if you want to return to your hometown to start a business, you must return to the fundamentals and bring farmers to work together." ”
The second story is related to a retired elderly man in Yunnan.
His name is Yang Guangqian, he is in his sixties, and he is one of the hundreds of millions of donors on Tencent's charity platform.
Over the past three years, he has donated 30 million steps to Tencent, which is his daily journey from home to hospital to volunteer.
Over the years, he has also donated one dollar a day through the Tencent charity platform to children's charity projects, and has donated more than 1,000 yuan.
"If I have a little bit of strength, I can make a little contribution," he said. ”
The third story has to do with glacier conservation.
Professor Zhu Jia of Nanjing University, winner of the Xplorer Prize, is working with Tencent Carbon Neutrality Laboratory on glacier protection experiments on the Dagu Glacier in Aba, Sichuan, exploring the laying of a new nanomaterial that can radiate and cool the glacier.
If successful, preliminary estimates could slow glacier retreat by about 80 percent.
Zhu Jia said that what he cares about is the relationship between the development of science and technology and humanistic care, and science and technology should help those who are weak, lack attention and social well-being, and the protection of Dagu Glacier comes from this original intention.
These stories are all from this annual magazine "Care".
What they do varies greatly, from helping neighbors, villages, and children to protecting glaciers in the face of global warming.
But in my opinion, they all have the same original intention, which is to care about the people they get along with, care about this society, care about the world, and feel that they should do something for it to make it better.
Its starting point is simple, even instinctive, this emotion, that is, care.
It makes people go beyond utilitarianism and mutual assistance, so that human society still has a closely linked bond in the face of difficulties and challenges, which is the certainty I see.
Two
From the convergence of these concerns, I also found resonance, why these people with different professions can create sustainable social value with us, because we share the same concern, it is the reason for forming consensus, promoting sharing, and achieving win-win results, and it is the foundation of social value to create a more bottom, soft and strong human nature.
Since Tencent launched its sustainable social value innovation strategy and established the Sustainable Social Value Business Unit (SSV) in April last year, it has gradually formed three main lines: basic research, rural development, and the digitalization of public welfare.
At the same time, it has carried out explorations in many fields such as education innovation and digital education, elderly care technology, medical inclusion, social emergency, digital culture, carbon neutrality, FEW (food, energy and water).
It is not only the need for enterprises to respond to the expectations of the country and the times, but also the result of Tencent's gradual expansion of "concentric circles of goodness" from caring for users and people to caring for society.
Tencent's mission and vision of "user-oriented, technology for good" is essentially how to use the ability of technology to better care for people. The creation of social value is the process of concretizing abstract goodness and emotional concern into executable strategies, actions, products and operations.
Only when we always maintain sufficient empathy for social pain points, that is, care, and innovation of sustainable social value can we always maintain sensitivity, vitality and depth.
For example, life emergency is not only a huge social need, but also a personal pain.
Many years ago, a colleague of ours died of an accident during a morning jog.
Since 2016, I have been thinking about how to find first-aid equipment as quickly as possible when someone around me is sick, find people with first-aid ability, and implement rescue.
Later, a concept was gradually formed to create a digital emergency system, and eventually introduced to the society, making it a strong supplement to the 120 emergency system. We did in-house experiments.
When someone faints, anyone can scan the nearby emergency code and call the nearest volunteer, and there will be corresponding incentives in the system. Last year, someone fainted in our building, and using such a system, more than 20 colleagues came upstairs and downstairs in 4 minutes.
After promoting the innovation strategy of sustainable social value, the Social Emergency Lab was established to explore this area more comprehensively and deeply. Such similar emergency systems have been implemented in nearly 40 universities, shopping malls, communities and industrial parks, achieving rapid rescue within 4 minutes.
We launched an open emergency platform that connects tens of thousands of AED devices and volunteers, and allows the public to check the location status of equipment in real time through maps.
At the same time, paying attention to the problem of hearing impaired group first aid, we have made text call 120 possible through AI technology, and this barrier-free first aid function has been connected to emergency centers in more than 40 cities including Beijing.
In fact, such a first aid system is beginning to work.
On October 22 this year, on the football field of the School of International Relations, with the help of AED first-aid equipment donated by Tencent, a student who fell into cardiac arrest while playing football successfully rescued a student.
This process of starting from concern and finally turning into products to help solve social pain points is also the epitome of sustainable social value strategy innovation and exploration in many fields.
Colleagues used Tencent Meeting's noise-canceling technology in cochlear implants and hearing aids to help hearing-impaired children and the elderly, office OA technology on the village affairs management platform that stimulates the endogenous motivation of villagers, game technology on helping real industries build a true Internet factory, and artificial intelligence technology in space exploration to find pulsars with the Sky Eye FAST telescope.
These technologies, all through connectivity, innovate the solution path to the problem.
In the past, I said that Tencent is a connector, and I thought more from the tool level. Later, with the deepening of the exploration of social values, we saw that the essence of connection is beyond tools, and this essence is to care for people.
When we have such a perspective, we can rediscover products and technologies, and expand more application scenarios to solve social problems.
Three
It is also true when the development of the entire company is considered from this perspective.
Tencent's starting point is QQ, and the reason why it has gained a foothold in China and then developed rapidly is that we have always carefully understood the needs of users and made every effort to improve. Every little improvement may bring great satisfaction to users.
For example, many people used QQ in Internet cafes at that time, if the communication information was stored locally, the next time the user opened it could not be found, we overcame technical difficulties, took the lead in storing user information on the server, and later launched practical functions such as file transfer and group chat, improved compression technology, and gave users free download.
When WeChat was launched, it also faced competition, and we found that users have great demand for fast transmission of voice and pictures, so we made the compression technology of the mobile terminal the ultimate and became the fastest and most convenient transmission among similar products, thus becoming the user's first choice.
These are superficially the optimization of product technology, and the internal drive is whether there is a real understanding of the user, whether they are taken to heart, that is, whether they care enough about people.
It is the password for Tencent's growth, and I firmly believe that the development foundation of modern enterprises is based on caring for people.
When we are good at listening to needs, improving people's quality of life, and then pursuing the increase of corporate well-being to society, it can be deeply rooted in the social soil and make growth without a ceiling.
I later proposed the "CBS Trinity", emphasizing service to users, industries, and then society, and ultimately pointed to creating value for society. Investing in sustainable social values is as important as our investment in R&D, ostensibly costly, but in essence it consolidates the foundation of enterprise development. This is like a big banyan tree that has grown into a forest for a century, and the deeper the roots in creating sustainable social value are in the soil of society, the more the user value and industrial value that grow on it will flourish.
CBS feeds back to each other, complements each other, and is a trinity. This is because I believe that caring for employees internally and users, customers, and society externally can build a network of trust and symbiotic relationships.
When you put your heart and action, the society will also return with goodwill and trust, so CBS can feed each other and integrate symbiosis.
At present, Tencent has made a lot of explorations in the creation of social value and the integration of CBS. But compared to its commercial volume, I think there is still a lot of room for improvement.
I hope that in the future, Tencent will not only hand over answers to shareholders in financial reports; The creation of social value is also an answer to the society that continues to grow.
In order to turn such a vision into reality, it is particularly important to promote the integration of social value and commercial value. Social value is not just a department doing, but gradually integrated into the main business, then the total amount of social value created by Tencent will have large-scale growth.
This is not just a hypothesis, WeChat Pay has consciously done such explorations.
In consumption scenarios such as catering, WeChat Pay has joined hands with tens of thousands of love stores to launch "love meals" and "love water" to thank sanitation workers. Users can freely donate their love in consumption scenarios such as daily food ordering, and donors can also know the whereabouts of donations in time through real-time feedback from WeChat Pay.
In coffee and other consumption scenarios, we work with merchants to advocate low-carbon consumption, and upload the low-carbon situation of users when purchasing services to the platform through the low-carbon data interface of WeChat Pay, accumulating low-carbon records for users.
Another example is the launch of the "Self-Supporting Small Shops" program to help people with disabilities find employment for small businesses on WeChat Pay, providing barrier-free digital business tools for people with disabilities, and identifying small businesses with disabilities through cooperation with the Disabled Persons' Federation, and guiding users to support small business consumption through sharing.
In these projects, users can get small red flowers, which can be donated to public welfare projects on the Tencent charity platform, which makes users feel very accomplished.
Such a ubiquitous scene of public welfare is like spring wind and rain for users, word-of-mouth improvement for WeChat Pay, and innovative solutions to pain points for society, and the three complement each other.
The inspiration given to us by these cases is that WeChat Pay has a concern for people, the environment and society in exploring the integration of social value and commercial value, and then realizes it with core technologies and product capabilities, truly helping beneficiaries, and the government, society and the public also give positive feedback.
This is what I expect to see, sustainable social value becomes the foundation of the company's development, and it needs to be gradually realized in such exploration; We hope that more business will be concerned, find pain points, innovate applications, and integrate sustainable social value innovation into products and processes, and into the company's blood.
It is also believed that in the future, more enterprises may serve people and society through the excellent use of their core scientific and technological capabilities, which not only creates great social value, but also naturally drives commercial value, forming a benign and self-consistent closed loop from business to society.
When there are more and more such companies, a new collaborative network driven by technological innovation and integrating business capabilities and social goals may emerge.
It will be a three-dimensional, systematic, global, multi-party co-creation platform for science and technology for good.
It sounds a little far away, but when we move forward with our co-creators, when we push forward with long-term determination, such a picture will slowly approach until it is realized, and this is the certainty I understand.