Introduction
With both significant populations of both individuals and corporations are focused on sustainability around the world, perhaps an overlooked ingredient in all this is socially responsible innovation. Sustainability has become a powerful consumer driver market that focuses on everything from personal health and wellness, to corporate social responsibility and business efficiency. To meet this growing global trend, forward-looking companies are quickly recognizing the challenges, and opportunities, of socially responsible innovation. These companies are now “wrestling with several critical topics: tapping into ‘green’ technologies to rethink product/packaging formulation and manufacturing processes; consumer demands for non-toxic, family-friendly products; open accountability and transparent communications about their organization’s environmental impact; competitors’ ‘green’ claims (whether real or unfounded); and compliance with Government legislation and other industry standards.”[1]
Corporate Social Innovation (Not Responsibility)
Michael Karnjanaprakorn, Co-Founder of All Day Buffet, and author of an article on Corporate Social Innovation expounds on a documentary from 2003 called The Corporation. The film “looks at the rise of the corporate body as having the legal status of a “person” — albeit with no conscience — and its collective psychopathic raping of the planets’ people and resources due to a greed-based bottom-line motivation.”[2] According to Mr. Karnjanaprakorn, “Most critics argue that corporations should have some “responsibility” to society. That’s all good and well, except that the form that currently takes is pretty weak (some charity here and there, looking at supply chains at best).”[3] It is Mr. Karnjanaprakorn’s belief that traditional Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) does not go far enough. For Mr. Karnjanaprakorn, multinational corporation like Nike that donate $22,000,000 (1.0% of their profit) to different charities over a given year are – while commendable – is not as ‘responsible’ as, say, investing in innovation so as to remove the need to donate to a charity that helps people deal with the pollution from a Nike plant, for example. Mr. Karnjanaprakorn has developed three tenets that he believes would define what it means to invest in Corporate Social Innovation (CSI) instead of CSR.
- Innovation, not Responsibility: Looking at how corporations can come up with new and better solutions in an exponentially changing landscape to provide more value.
- Impact over multiple bottom lines, not just one: Measure impact over people, profit, planet.
- Investment into the long-term, not charity: Integrating budgets from “cause or CRS based” initiatives into innovative infrastructures that leverage the core competencies of the business to create real and much bigger change than one-off donations.[4]
Daimler Chrysler
Corporate social innovation is not a new concept. Authors Charles Holliday, Stephen Schmidheiny, and Philip Watts in their book Walking the Talk: The Business Case for Sustainable Development, state that, “ever since launching its first automobile, Mercedes-Benz has used components made of renewable raw materials in manufacturing its cars. The initial deployment of renewable raw materials at the beginning of the 20th century includes the use of rubber in the production of tires and gaskets and as a binder in padding materials. With the end of World War 2, Mercedes-Benz began to use more and more natural fiber products in car interiors.”[5] Additionally, “Through R&D work, DaimlerChrysler has, for the first time, been able to deploy natural fibers within an entire process chain. This includes fiber selection and specification, fiber preparation and processing, component manufacture, materials and component approval, and recycling. This provides opportunities for beneficial technology transfer, as the procedures are transferable to developing countries. The use of locally grown natural fibers for the local production of plastic components is part of the global DaimlerChrysler strategy to increase the local content in different areas of the world.”[6]
Conclusion
Although the concept of social entrepreneurship to many is much more appealing and sexy than mainstream commercial business, Ms. Tania Ellis insists that “we need the power of both to push the field of socially responsible and socially innovative companies forward.”[7] Ellis goes on to say that the new business revolution is, in fact, “being driven both top-down from some of the world’s largest companies - and bottom-up from entrepreneurial activists and social change makers. Because hardcore business people are realizing that they can increase their profits by incorporating social responsibility as a part of their business strategy, and hardcore idealists are recognizing that the use of market methods gives them the opportunity to create even more social value. To them there is no doubt: the blended value proposition of social, environmental and financial value all being parts of one essential value is the future way of thinking value creation, as already promoted in CSR, social investing (SRI), venture philanthropy and indeed social entrepreneurship.”[8]
[1] http://www.innovation-point.com/socialinnovation.htm [2] http://www.alldaybuffet.org/2009/10/13/corporate-social-innovation-not-responsibility/ [3] Ibid. [4] http://www.alldaybuffet.org/2009/10/13/corporate-social-innovation-not-responsibility/ [5] Holliday, Charles O. Jr., Stephen Schmidheiny, Philip Watts. Walking the Talk: The Business Case for Sustainable Development. UK: Greenleaf Publishing Limited, 2002. Print. Page 215. [6] Holliday, Charles O. Jr., Stephen Schmidheiny, Philip Watts. Walking the Talk: The Business Case for Sustainable Development. UK: Greenleaf Publishing Limited, 2002. Print. Page 215. [7] http://thenewpioneers.biz/2011/01/24/a-business-force-for-good/ [8] Ibid.
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