4C Strategies receives government funding to develop unique tool for reputational risk management

Vinnova, Sweden’s innovation agency, today announced that 4C Strategies will receive a grant of approx 1,7 MSEK for the development of a new software service which will help organisations to manage reputational risk. 

Reputational risk is perceived as the number one enterprise risk according to recent studies, and Social Media Intelligence is one of the fastest growing markets within Business Intelligence. This motivates the development of a software service, Responsive Reputational Risk Monitoring (3RM) - web-based and for mobile platforms - which enables companies and organizations to identify developing reputational risks and opportunities through real time risk indicators and social media intelligence. 

3RM will be the premier tool for reputational risk management implementing state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing technology with the highest available accuracy and recall. It will enable rapid strategic response through automatic deployment of 4C’s other consultancy and software solutions.
One of the main efforts in developing this product, which is also what makes the service unique, will be fusing various data streams containing information about key reputation risk indicators (such as pricing, availability, environmental concern, working conditions for employees etc) with the expressed sentiment of the public, garnered from open source outlets such as news media and social media (are people for instance expressing disappointment or anger). This information must then be made actionable, for instance by applying a notification system which can alert the responsible manager when it sees a significant increase in some risk indicator.

Thus, translating information about public sentiment and about multiple risk indicators into actionable intelligence constitutes the main innovation. By correlating public sentiment with risk indicators over time, detrimental reputational events can be mitigated or even avoided. If successful this will tie the risk management process closer to strategic decision making thereby filling an important gap in the ERM cycle. As such, 3RM will be the kind of service which is extremely sought after today. 
4C is one of very few actors positioned to launch a service like 3RM, due to its leading risk management and big data expertise, and its highly skilled software development team.