I recently got a chance to read a paper written James Austin & Ezequiel Reficco called (obviously…) “Corporate Social Entrepreneurship”.
The paper mentions CSE as “The process of extending the firm’s domain of competence and corresponding opportunity set through innovative leveraging of resources, both within and outside its direct control, aimed at the simultaneous creation of economic and social value.”
It goes on to say that the CSR initiatives currently in place are not enough for a sustainable future. To reach the acceptable levels of corporate social responsibility a more vigorous development and change in the core culture of the organizations is required.
The paper presents the research on The Timberland Company and Starbucks Coffee to demonstrate how Corporate Social Entrepreneurship can help organizations attain this by following a five pronged approach:
- Enabling Environment for entrepreneurial mindset to cultivate that can cause a fundamental organizational transformation.
- Having Corporate Social Intrapreneurs, acting as the change agents change agents required to bring about this cultural shift or internal organizational transformation. It also outlines how these Intrapreneurs are not to me confused with good old fashioned managers who would still be required to see these initiatives through and implement them.
- Working with a “Corporate Purpose” to become a value based organization. This means that there needs to be a clear mention of need of the organization to fulfill its social responsibility in its mission and vision statement.
- Understand the concept of Value creation and Double (or triple) bottom line. This essentially aims at having the very purpose of the organization not only to maximize wealth of the shareholders but that of all stakeholders, “with those being defined as groups who are significantly affected by company actions and who can in turn impact the company. The underlying premise is that serving such a broader constituency will make the company more sustainable.”
- Looking for collaborating with other businesses, civil society or event the government to co-generating value for the society they exist in. It mentions how collaboration enables creation of new constellations of resources for the CSE initiatives to come to fulfilment.
In the end, the paper talks about how the corporations have met success in implementing CSR initiatives but are far from an ideal situation and need the rethinking of their core strategies. However the kind of radical organizational change that it requires should be done one step at a time to avoid a host of well documented change management issues.
This paper was chosen to show a difference between the “regular” corporate entrepreneurship and the social counterpart of it. It seemed to me, that it should be more challenging for a CSIntrapreneur to bring about a change in the business than a CEntrepreneur, who in any case is pushing get more value for the shareholders. Also, the concepts seems like the next step to Corporate Entrepreneurship.
In my opinion, the paper brought about some good points and has hit some crucial notes when taking care of incorporating the concepts of CE into the CSR realm, however there is a much better case I think that could be made to have the CSE process help create socially responsible spinoffs from bigger firms than trying to change the complete culture of the organization. However, for organizations that are half way there, this concept could be of some implementable value.
The complete paper is available at: http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/09-101.pdf