It's one of the primary rules of entrepreneurialism: To be successful, a business needs to help address a problem. From that perspective, Peter Ohnemus and his company, Asset4, are off to a good start.

They're going after pretty much everything that ails us, from global warming to child labor to excessive executive pay. Better yet, there are already a few trillion dollars betting that Ohnemus knows what he's doing. So why have you never heard of him?

Because Ohnemus, who was born in Denmark and lives in Switzerland, isn't actually out to directly solve the problems facing humanity. Instead, he's focused on helping investors figure out how to incorporate such considerations into the way they evaluate the companies they invest in.

But here's the thing: If his idea catches on, it might just have the same ultimate effect. If no one invests in companies that don't have a social conscience, they'll be hard-pressed to keep the doors open and the lights on for long.

Ohnemus, a serial entrepreneur, admits that the motivation behind Asset4 was as much selfishness as it was a desire to make the world a better place. Since 1993, when he sold a database company, SQL, to Sybase, he'd either built or been involved with three other companies that went public. By the turn of the century, he found himself preoccupied with what you might call a high-class problem: how to invest the substantial wealth he'd accumulated to that point.

Around that time, he came across a book that instilled in him both a sense of dread for the planet as well as an idea for a new business. The tome is High Noon: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them by Jean-François Rischard, the chief economist for the World Bank.

"It's a scary book," Ohnemus says. "I read it twice in one week. And then I called Henrik Steffensen, my co-founder, and told him I had an idea for a new company. We would create the Bloomberg for extra-financial data."

Investors, says Ohnemus, have no shortage of providers of financial information from the usual suspects: Bloomberg, Reuters, Thomson, Standard & Poor's, and more. What they don't have, he argues, is a reliable source for everything else that matters about a company-intangible assets like reputation, environmental policy, and a commitment to workplace safety.