Multi-capital abundance is the goal Ethan Roland and Gregory Landua set in 📝Regenerative Enterprise: a system healthy enough across all eight forms of capital that it yields a harvestable surplus in each, without drawing down the core stock of any.
The phrase is the book's subtitle and its thesis: "enterprises can be created that produce wealth while increasing the health and vitality of living human communities and the ecosystems in which they live," and they "will produce multi-capital abundance by mimicking natural ecosystems and collaboratively forming multi-entity alliances" (p. 8). The book uses the phrase as a goal rather than a defined term; the definition above is distilled from the principles it rests on. Abundance is counted across all of the 📝8 Forms of Capital, so a business that grows money by spending living capital is a 📝degenerative system, however profitable. It grows through 📝edges and connections rather than sheer quantity, depends on 📝harvesting the surplus rather than the core, is rooted in the four 📝nurture capitals, and asks for a 📝regenerative system rather than a merely sustainable one.
Roland and Landua argue that no single enterprise reaches it alone. Under "multi-capital optimization," an enterprise ecology assigns each form of capital to the enterprises best placed to grow it, and "as long as individual enterprises can generate a surplus of each form of capital to be reinvested back into the ecology as a whole, multi-capital optimization is feasible" (pp. 38–39). Such ecologies, they predict, "will have emergent properties of overall ecosystem health, human happiness, and system resilience" (p. 39).
The idea also reshapes investment. Individual enterprises "will not be likely to achieve multi-capital abundance alone," so the authors urge investors toward functional enterprise ecologies, whose returns are "potentially eight-fold": financial return extended by growth in the other forms of capital across a bioregion (p. 41).