The Tomorrow’s Value Rating builds on five years’ experience with its predecessor rating, the Accountability Rating. Launched in 2004 and run annually by Two Tomorrows in association with the international think-tank AccountAbility, the Accountability Rating evaluated and benchmarked companies on their commitment and ability to manage social and environmental issues responsibly.

Headline results from the global application of the Rating were published in Fortune magazine. In addition, ratings of the largest companies in a particular country were carried out by partner companies in countries including Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal.

The Accountability Rating drew on a number of international frameworks for corporate responsibility:

• The AA1000 Series, including the AA1000 Assurance Standard and the AA1000 Stakeholder Engagement Standard.
• The United Nations Global Compact, which challenges business leaders to apply universal standards in their operations worldwide.
• The GRI Sustainability Reporting Guidelines, a set of principles and indicators for reporting on sustainability performance, accompanied by a range of technical and sector-specific guidance notes and supplements.

In the five years following the launch of the Accountability Rating, the practices it assessed became increasingly common in the world’s largest companies. At the same time, other rating initiatives such as the Dow Jones Sustainability Index and the FTSE4Good index integrated several criteria similar to those in the Accountability Rating. The founding partners therefore concluded in early 2009 that the mission of the Accountability Rating had been successfully completed.

The Tomorrow’s Value Rating is the next logical step in the journey. It is designed to assess and advance the areas of corporate sustainability performance that still have much scope for improvement among the majority of companies, that offer companies big opportunities for competitive differentiation, and that will be the future drivers of long-term value generation. For more, see methodology.