Corporate Social Responsibility and Strategic Management Essay Example
Innovation refers to the introduction of a new idea aimed at improving the functionality of an existing method or device. On the other hand, corporate social responsibility is the business commitment to behave ethically, contribute to the economic development and improve the living standards of its employees and the society as a whole.
According to European Conference on Knowledge Management, et al (2013), corporate social responsibility is a company’s responsibility towards the environment and community in which it operates. Such a responsibility can be in different forms including; reduction of waste and pollution, educational and social program contribution among others.
Companies adopt CSR to stimulate innovation, help in ensuring efficiency, and also to create a continued organizational growth. The CSR serves as a framework in which innovations are identified and exploited to benefit a company in terms of impacts arising from the innovation on the environmen
...t and the society.
Most social innovations help in creating new business models that can be implemented to meet the needs of those underserved populations in a more efficient way, more profitable and also sustainably. Majority of innovations tend to solve social problems hence supporting the corporate social responsibility.
Besides, there exists a bi-directional system of CSR-driven innovations and innovation-driven CSR. This bi-directional system exhibits dependency between innovation and corporate social responsibility. The CSR-driven innovations include; corporate social innovation, eco-innovation, the bottom of the pyramid innovation and social entrepreneurship.
The CSR-driven innovations focus on low income populations creating a valuable market out of them and benefiting them by solving their urgent needs. On the other hand innovation-driven CSR focuses on creating social processes and is generally driven by value. In general, innovation-driven CSR is doin
things right while CSR-driven innovation is doing the right things (Louche, Idowu& Leal, 2010).
Strategic management is the process of identifying a business’ specific goals, designing strategies to achieve these goals and the process of implementing these strategies. This shows that for a company to realize its goals, it must have the most effective strategy put in place.
The main goal of a business is to outdo their competitors by producing the best products and offering the best services to their customers. The most important strategy for any company in the current environment that rapidly changes include the abilities of becoming more competitive in terms of value creation and also being innovative.
Innovation strategy is widely considered to be essential to the success of businesses due to its ability to stimulate different firms’ growth as well as offering a competitive advantage in environments where scale economies do not exists. A company needs to invest in innovation to avoid the risks of having its products getting marginalized more technologically advanced competitors (Wong, 2014).
Strategic management is a wide process that requires an innovative input. According to Davenport, Leibold&Voelpel (2006), the process of strategic planning involves four stages. In the first stage the innovators make assumptions about the new ideas’ future and success. The second stage involves developing the strategy which is a creative way of providing means of goal achievement.
The third step is to implement the plan and includes testing the validity of important assumptions. Lastly, the innovators will use the test results to decide on whether to implement the plan through significant investment. All this strategic planning stages show that innovation is directly correlated to the strategic management.
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