Social business seems to have many meanings, but the most powerful is surely "the creation of shared value" for everybody in a business value chain. Customer co-creation projects are a good case in point. Super-users of a product get new insights into the product and an opportunity to be involved in its design — value for the product manufacturer, value for the user.

The place of shared value is by no means certain in modern business, though. When some companies talk about social business, they might not have shared value in mind.

To explore this issue, I worked with Global Dawn, the social business platform, to create an infographic that traces the history of social business — but this is a crowdsourced project.

Please review the infographic and if you have any thoughts about what is missing, what's right or wrong, or how shared value should be expressed, please comment. Where else should the flags go? What other brands have been integral to its development? I'll collect viewpoints and adapt the infographic for re-publication in February. Find more explanation below the graphic.

Social business has evolved from multiple sources and is taking business in a new direction. From the development of micro-finance to today’s customer ecosystems, shared value and social business is all about empowering people and creating a more collaborative human-centered business environment.

The technology stream

A strong tradition running through social business — dating back to the free software movement and then open source — is the idea of making a contribution to the ecosystem you work within. That tradition has also helped build the web into a giant, free, collaborative resource.

The marketing stream

Another strong tradition begins with multi-level marketing and loyalty programs. The web has enhanced the capacity of smart firms to build loyalty by engaging more deeply with customers and by interacting in more equal terms.

The social stream

Finally there is the tradition of social itself, beginning with the micro-finance initiatives that were designed to replace development aid in what used to be called the third world. That tradition has informed open innovation, the large mobile ecosystems that flourished first in Kenya, and then crowdsourcing.

Haydn Shaughnessy writes Forbes' Re:thinking Innovation blog. Formerly, he was a senior researcher at the European Institute for the Media and a partner at The Conversation Group, the leading global social technologies consultancy.