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Linking Business and Society: An Overview Read chapter Read first chapter

2014 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Opening the Door to Opportunities: How to Design CR Strategies that Optimize Impact for Business and Society

Author : Michael Fürst

Published in: Sustainable Entrepreneurship

Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg

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Abstract

Historically, activities dealing with these topics – often “bundled” under the term Corporate Responsibility (CR) – had a strong focus on philanthropy that can create social impact if conceptualized with a strategic view but have genuine problems in terms of scalability and replicability. Based on these limitations the genuine entrepreneurial activity understood as a mechanism to create new, sustainable business models through the transformation of societal challenges into innovative and sustainable services needs to be emphasized and specifically addressed in a strategic approach to CR. Therefore, as this is increasingly understood, the trendlines are pointing in the direction of focusing more strongly on activities that are aligning social and commercial ambition and can result in large-scale responsibility engagement, without ignoring philanthropy or zero profit initiatives if such kind of interventions contribute to solving societal challenges. Strategic CR should therefore aim to operate with a portfolio of tailored activities, comprising philanthropic initiatives, zero profit, social business or lower margin business models that are all closely linked to a company’s strategy and core competencies and are operated through a strong ethical governance.

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previous chapter Sustainable Entrepreneurship: Next Stage of Responsible Business
next chapter Embedding Sustainable Entrepreneurship in Companies: The Eternal Internal Challenge
Footnotes
1
The work of Peter Drucker may serve here as an important reference. Of a more current date see the short but instructive remarks of Heracleous et al. in Harvard Business Review that is titled “The myth of shareholder capitalism”.
 
2
We will not dive into detail in regards to explaining (the sometimes subtle) differences of these terms and will just refer to the term Corporate Responsibility in this article.
 
3
See also the work of Peter Drucker: “[…] profitability is not the purpose of, but a limiting factor on business enterprise and business activity. Profit is not the explanation, cause or rationale of business behavior and business decisions, but rather the test of their validity.” Drucker 1973, p. 60.See Drucker 2001a; Drucker 2001b, p. 18.
 
4
As an example may serve the pharmaceutical industry in which biotechs of smaller size are frequently perceived as the core cell of innovation. Similarly the electronics industry where a comparably smaller company such as Apple was driving technological innovation and shaped consumer behavior.
 
5
See here the very lucid analysis in Drucker 2001c or Christensen et al. 2006. One can see here very clearly the linkage points to the differentiation between entrepreneur and bureaucratic manager as laid out by Stevenson.
 
6
Novartis follows the approach of having a targeted CR portfolio where philanthropic activities are mainly driven by the Novartis Foundation for Sustainable Development and comprises zero profit activities such as the Novartis Malaria Initiative which has provided 600 million anti-malarial treatments since 2001 (http://​malaria.​novartis.​com/​downloads/​malaria-initiative/​factsheet- malaria-initiative.​pdf), April 2013. Novartis has also founded a social business group which is responsible for managing country-specific social business activities such as ArogyaParivar.
 
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Metadata
Title
Opening the Door to Opportunities: How to Design CR Strategies that Optimize Impact for Business and Society
Author
Michael Fürst
Copyright Year
2014
Publisher
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Book
Sustainable Entrepreneurship

Print ISBN: 978-3-642-38752-4

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-642-38753-1

Copyright Year: 2014

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38753-1_11