Where RBP comes from, and how it works.

Dr. Chandra Vadhana Radhakrishnan (Dr. CeeVee)

Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellow; Senior Lecturer in sustainable innovation and entrepreneurship at Monash Business School; guest faculty at UC Berkeley. PhD in Management with a focus in psychometrics.

The Regenerative Business Protocol was developed by Dr. Chandra Vadhana Radhakrishnan (Dr. CeeVee), a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Monash Business School, where she teaches sustainable innovation and entrepreneurship. The framework began as research at Stanford's Gendered Innovations Lab during her Fulbright fellowship, initially under the name RSAF (Regenerative Startup Assessment Framework).

RSAF was renamed to RBP as the framework evolved to serve businesses beyond the startup stage, broadening its relevance to established SMEs and larger organizations navigating supply chain ESG pressure. The rename also reflects an evolution in the assessment items themselves, expanded to include Responsible Technologies & Innovation as AI adoption became a material factor in how businesses operate and make decisions. Dr. CeeVee has since served as guest faculty at UC Berkeley, where the framework has been used directly with executive education cohorts.

The 14 pillars were not chosen arbitrarily. They were derived from a synthesis of existing ESG and sustainability frameworks, cross-checked against gaps those frameworks tend to leave open, and then validated by a multidisciplinary panel spanning sustainability academia, venture capital, ESG law, and public health. That panel process is what allows RBP to claim rigor beyond any single author's perspective. Dr. CeeVee holds a PhD in Management with a focus in psychometrics, the discipline behind designing and validating measurement instruments, which underpins how the RBP's 97 assessment items were built and tested for reliability rather than assembled informally.

The distinction between regenerative and sustainable is deliberate and central to how RBP scores a business. Sustainability, as most ESG frameworks define it, is about reducing harm: minimizing negative impact, meeting compliance thresholds, and managing downside risk. Regeneration asks a different question: does this business give back more than it takes? A regenerative business actively strengthens the people, communities, and natural systems it touches, rather than simply doing less damage to them. RBP is built to measure that net positive contribution, not just risk mitigation.

Two pillars in particular set RBP apart from standard ESG models. Societal Health & Health Equity looks at how a business affects the health and wellbeing of the communities it operates in, including who benefits, who is left out, and how equitable access is designed into products, workplaces, and supply chains. Responsible Technologies & Innovation, added as the framework matured beyond its startup-focused RSAF origins, looks at how a business develops and deploys technology, including how AI is used across products, operations, and decision making, with attention to transparency, bias, and long-term impact.

RBP is organised as a wheel. Seven foundation pillars describe how the business runs; seven additional pillars describe its footprint on the world.

Each of the 97 items is answered on a 3-point scale, plus a fourth "not applicable" option:

• Not yet in place: 0 points.
• In progress: 5 points.
• Fully established: 10 points.
• Not applicable: excluded from averages but still counted toward completion.

Your pillar score is the average of the items in that pillar, excluding N/A. Your overall score is the average of the 14 pillar scores. Overall scores map to four maturity bands:

• Emerging: 0 to 3.3.
• Developing: 3.4 to 6.6.
• Established: 6.7 to 8.5.
• Regenerative Leader: 8.6 to 10.

Your report combines these numbers with a qualitative analysis generated against the RBP framework: an executive summary, strengths, priorities, a pillar-by-pillar breakdown, and a 12-item action plan.

Your private report shows how you compare to the average across your industry, whenever at least five other companies in that industry have finished the assessment. Below that threshold, we show the all-companies average so the comparison stays honest.

The public benchmarks page surfaces aggregate results only: maturity distribution, pillar averages, and industry cuts of at least five companies each. No individual company data is ever visible there.

• Your individual answers and report are private to you.
• Nothing is shared publicly unless you explicitly turn on a share badge for your result. Share pages are opt-in and noindex.
• Aggregate benchmarks only appear once a bucket has at least five completed assessments; smaller buckets are hidden.
• You can delete your data at any time by emailing us. See the FAQ for the specific address.

RBP is designed to complement, not replace, existing frameworks. For readers who want to go deeper into any of the underlying concepts, these are good starting points:

• B Corp Certification, for a widely recognized standard on verified social and environmental performance.
• The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), for the global policy framework RBP's environmental and social pillars are broadly aligned with.
• Doughnut Economics (Kate Raworth), for the economic model behind the "give back more than you take" framing that distinguishes regenerative from sustainable.
• GRI (Global Reporting Initiative) Standards, for the disclosure framework most large companies already use for Scope 3 and supply chain ESG reporting.
• RBP glossary of terms, for the definitions used throughout this site.