Corporation Social Responsibility (CSR) Driven Innovation

摘要

Management strategies driven by corporation social responsibility (CSR) and shareholders' value oriented objectives have been highly remarkable and successful for every business areas and sizes. As a result of such behaviors of firms, relevant activities have given a powerful and creative stepping-stone for sustainable values and development. Focusing on social responsibility and shareholder value of companies requires the understanding of the shareholder theory that companies should only respond to shareholders' interests and their only social responsibility is to maximize companies' values. From this perspective, any positive social act undertaken by a firm is associated with costs that would reduce profit and prejudice shareholders. This activity help the firm achieve society's confidence for the survival of firms. Based on these backgrounds, the real interest of companies is getting changed. That is, firms consider CSR and Socially Responsible Investment (CRI) for shareholders as important as a profit which is the only objective of companies. Until recently, most of studies have showed the impact of CSR and SRI on the performance in the sustainable development aspect, mainly social and environmental. However, there are lots of debates on the correlations between management strategies and financial performances, and also the resulting analyses have limitations statically. On the other hand, innovation is firms' primary concerns as well as their performance. Furthermore, innovation is a sustainable engine for firms' growth and survival. From this, this paper investigates the influence of firms' sustainable management on the innovation activities of firms. Indeed, we consider innovation by using a framework that verifies the factors necessary to explore (long-run investment) and exploit (short-run investment) innovations. With use of the Vigeo rating and the Thomson Reuters financial data in 2009, we divided 619 firms into several groups according to industry sectors, regions, and firm characteristics. Based on the empirical analysis, the present study identified the relationship between CSR and innovation activities of firms. We conclude that innovative investment is to prepare tomorrow's profits not only considering investments in technology and in R&D, but also dealing with sustainability to human, social, environmental, technical, and economic investments. In particular, this paper advocates a new approach to incorporate sustainability with innovation strategies by taking into account voluntary sustainable activities not just for investors, but also for other stakeholders including communities firms serve. Overall, this study can provide a comprehensive understanding on the effect of sustainable management strategies on the innovation and performance of firms.