Minna Halme

Types of corporate responsibility and engagement with NGOs: an exploration of business and societal outcomes

Purpose – This paper aims to classify different corporate responsibility (CR) actions into three types – philanthropy, CR integration and CR innovation – and examines different forms of corporate engagement with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) through this categorization. The focus is on the societal and business outcomes of engagement.Design/methodology/approach – The study analyzes 20 business‐NGO collaborations of three case companies – Hindustan Unilever, Nokia and Stora Enso. Cases are chosen based on revelatory sampling and data are gathered through documentary research of corporate sustainability reports, project reports and websites. Data analysis focuses on engagement forms, business and societal outcomes of engagement and utilizes a categorization of CR.Findings – Different CR types involve different forms of cooperation ranging from sponsorship to partnership. Furthermore, CR integration and CR innovation seem to have more potential for long‐term positive business outcomes than philanthrop...

Frugal and Reverse Innovations – Quo Vadis?

There is no lack of prefixes for a term innovation in innovation discourse. Concepts of frugal innovation and reverse innovation have emerged recently and there are already several hallmark examples of them. However, extant academic literature on these concepts is still quite limited. The purpose of this article is to analytically study these concepts by investigating their in the innovation landscape. We present a conceptual framework that combines drivers behind these concepts. We also discuss future research avenues to enrich our understanding of these seemingly important topics.

Implications of Frugal Innovations on Sustainable Development: Evaluating Water and Energy Innovations

Frugal innovations are often associated with sustainable development. These connections, however, are based on anecdotal assumptions rather than empirical evidence. This article evaluates the sustainability of four frugal innovations from water and energy sectors. For the purposes of the evaluation, a set of indicators was developed. Indicators are drawn from sustainable development goals by the United Nations and they encompass central dimensions of sustainability: ecological, social and economic. In this article, frugal innovations are compared to solutions that are currently used in similar low-income contexts. Studied frugal innovations were found more sustainable in terms of energy production and water purification capacity than the existing solutions. In terms of social sustainability, larger differences between innovations were found. For example, business models of frugal energy solutions focus on capacity building and the inclusion of marginalized low-income people, whereas business models of water purification solutions focus on more traditional corporate social responsibility activities, such as marketing awareness campaigns and cooperation with non-governmental organizations. Three major sustainability challenges for frugal innovators were identified: (1) the proper integration of material efficiency into product or service systems; (2) the patient promotion of inclusive employment; and (3) the promotion of inclusive and sustainable local industrialization. The article concludes that despite indisputable similarities between frugality and sustainability, it is problematic to equate the two conceptually.

Establishing and Maintaining Cross-Sectoral Actor Networks

This study examines a new phenomenon: networking across different public and private sectors of society towards the most important goal of today — sustainable development. The empirical evidence is from the field of tourism, which is among the largest industries of today’s world1. Travel and tourism is frequently classified as the world’s largest and fastest growing industry that provides a contribution into employment, GDP, capital investments, and taxation. Despite the fact that tourism is often offered as a solution to attract development both in the developed and the developing countries, awareness about economic, environmental, and social impacts of tourism activities necessitates the debate about the need for the tourism industry to develop in a sustainable manner.

Sustainability Innovation at the Base of the Pyramid Through Multi-Cited Rapid Ethnography

The past decade has seen a proliferation of suggestions for market-based solutions to global poverty. While research emphasizes that sustainability innovation aimed at poverty alleviation must be grounded in user needs, few studies demonstrate how to study the poor for purposes of early phase innovation in business enterprises, especially in multiple locations comparatively. This study suggests that the necessary understanding of low-income users and their practices can be gained through multi-sited rapid ethnography. We exemplify how the process moves from understanding of needs of poor toward innovation and offer a general framework for evaluating the success of these types of projects. The paper describes the challenges and solutions found in a multi-sited rapid ethnography research in urban base of the pyramid (BOP) contexts in Brazil, India, Russia and Tanzania. It suggests businesses can learn about the poor with the help this method and conduct sustainability innovation on the basis of on the needs of the poor, rather than start with existing products.

Many Ways to Rome: Exogenous and Endogenous CSR Pathways to Environmental and Social Performance

While many would agree that the reason-to-be of corporate social responsibility is the expected positive effects on the sustainability performance of business, there is little empirical evidence of outcomes of CSR for the natural environment or society. Meanwhile, little is known about how external drivers, internal CSR policies, strategies, management practices, and combinations thereof influence corporate environmental and social performance. In order to address this gap, in this paper we conduct case studies of 19 companies and seek to identify which configurations of internal and external conditions shape social and environmental performance. In other words we ask which combinations of institutional constraints and organizational practices influence social and environmental performance. Is the effectiveness of one organizational element dependent on the presence or absence of another such internal element? Or is the presence of an organizational CSR practice effective only in conjunction with an external factor such as government regulation or market pressure? The two institutional constraints we include in our analysis are external (market and legislative) pressure and form of ownership, while the three organizational practices chosen for our analysis are the level of organization of CSR, the level of use of environmental and social management tools, and the level of strategic integration of CSR. With organizational configurations in mind (e.g. Grandori & Furnari, 2008; Fiss, 2007), we do not expect to find only one configuration of institutional constraints and organizational CSR practices leading to positive (or negative) environmental and social performance, but investigate if multiple pathways lead to similar outcomes in terms of environmental and social performance (Aoki, 2001). In this paper we ask the following question: “Which institutional constraints and organizational CSR practices and combinations thereof contribute to the environmental and social performance of companies?�? We define CSR as company activities to integrate environmental, social and long-term economic concerns in business operations and in interactions with stakeholders, and the impacts of company’s operations to society (cf. Dahlsrud, 2008; COM, 2006; COM 2011). We focus on environmental and social outcomes of firm activity (see also Kang, 2013; Luo and Bhattacharya, 2009; Schuler and Cording, 2006; Waddock and Graves, 1997; Wood, 2010). We view social and environmental outcomes as encompassing both company performance and the impact of company activities for society. Social CSR includes items such as the quality of jobs, work life balance, job security, diversity, wage equality and gender equality. Environmental CSR include activities to combat climate change, protect national resources and pollution reduction.

Networking Toward Sustainability — Value Added?

Since the World Commission gave prominence to the concept of sustainable development in 1987, a variety of interpretations and attempts to implement `sustainability’ have emerged within different sectors of society, tourism among others’. The concept of `sustainable tourism’ has not escaped the fate of being modified and reinterpreted. The term sustainable tourism has come to encompass a set of principles and management methods that chart a path for tourism development such that, within the limits of local economic viability, a destination’s environmental and socio-cultural base are protected for the future (Welford et al., 1999). In general, there has been more rhetoric associated with the concept of sustainable tourism than attempts to make it operational. In order to provide evidence of how the rhetoric gets interpreted and implemented in practice, the present study looks at how actors in the field of tourism see it. To that end, instead of pursuing strict definitions of sustainable tourism, we consider the elements of sustainable development: environment, economy, and social and cultural issues in the context of tourism.

When Is There a Sustainability Case for CSR? Pathways to Environmental and Social Performance Improvements

Little is known about when corporate social responsibility (CSR) leads to a sustainability case (i.e., to improvements in environmental and social performance). Building on various forms of decoupling, we develop a theoretical framework for examining pathways from institutional pressures through CSR management to sustainability performance. To empirically identify such pathways, we apply fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to an extensive dataset from 19 large companies. We discover that different pathways are associated with environmental and social performance (non)improvements, and that pathways to success and failure are for the most part not symmetrical. We identify two pathways to improved environmental performance: an exogenous and an endogenous one. We find two pathways to improved social performance that both involve integrating social responsibility into the core business. Pathways to nonimprovements are multiple, suggesting that failure can occur in a number of ways, while there are only a few pathways to sustainability performance improvements.

Business Models for Material Efficiency Services

Despite the broad recognition of the need for decoupling the material use and the economic development, enterprises are still not using all the opportunities for material efficiency improvements. This chapter proposes material efficiency services as one solution. It also introduces a conceptual framework for analyzing business models of eco-efficient services and applies this framework to material efficiency services. Four business models are outlined and their feasibility is studied from an empirical vantage point, with special emphasis on the financial aspects. Depending on the business model, prominent material efficiency service providers range from large companies with variety of products and/or services to smaller, specialized ones. Typical potential clients for these services are firms that lack the resources to conduct material efficiency improvements themselves. Customers are more likely to use material efficiency services that relate to auxiliary materials or side-streams rather than those that relate to their core business. Potential client organizations with a strategy of outsourcing support activities and with experience of outsourcing are keener to use material efficiency services.