Responsibility, sustainability and social innovation: a challenge for the future.
In the wake of the event that took place on 4th of June 2014 at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome “Responsabilità, sostenibilità e innovazione sociale: quale futuro? Il salone della CSR e responsabilità sociale” organized by NeXt Nuova Economia per Tutti, we seek to elaborate the node of social responsibility in light of the participants ‘perspective, including the author’s.
The aim of the workshop was to conceptualize the collaboration as a means to enhance the value of the business chain and to appraise the principles of corporate ethics and cooperative partnership, which stems from a bottom-up innovation.
Developing a network of cooperation and collaboration among citizens, enterprises and public administration (PA) is the first step for defining new roles in the civic society and to demarcate the power of active citizenship on the territory.
The issue of CRS (corporate social responsibility) is crucial and represents the core of the debate since the era of post-capitalism is demanding for a more inclusive growth and for a social enrichment, in light of the promotion of social quality as the new reference-index for business value.
Trustiness toward PA and enterprises is directly linked to CSR policies and the ability to instill a social profit within the framework of institutional debate, could enable the neural activation of the real centers of sustainability, namely cities and citizens.
The social renewal is path-dependent from collaborative processes and from the active sharing of competences and interests through practices of co-working and digital networking, which should bridge knowledge and information to the various poles of participation.
The new paradigm of sustainability shall be recalibrated under the umbrella of a welcoming ecosystem, which should streamline bureaucratic procedures in favor of new agile forms of sharing economy.
It is very important to create and foster communities, as well as to consider the importance of social ties among citizens and civic society as the direct incarnation of a collective assumption of responsibility. Empirical data are showing a growing attitude in developing and applying cooperative models of participation to social, cultural and economic processes. The bottom-up approach could in this sense represent the materialization of the identity of a given society.
The social exclusion is against the necessity to replicate a model of isomorphism at the level of enterprises; the perception is that we need to promote a value of adherence between the business processes, the functioning of the PA and the participation of stakeholders, including consumers: the lines of leadership and the relationships among relevant actors shall be arranged upon a comprehensive system of values that reflect social needs and sensations.
Building up a CSR innovation means to mirror the stakeholders’ interests in view of a pact of social collaboration and cooperative project management, to be intended in the broad sense of territorial inclusion.
Several companies are nowadays committed to an integrated CSR strategy and more importantly, is far more prominent the widespread tendency of investors to commit themselves to actions of social responsibility (SRI: social responsible investors).
Finally, the scope of CSR policies is to foster the creation of a shared value (CSV) and to pursue a new mode of understanding among different generations and civic roles. The virtue of partnership is the new reference for creating an added value, as a double-layered sword that could cut the inefficiencies of economy and society.
We are ready to change as representatives of both the world of the academia and enterprises, but a third pole for triangulation is necessary. In light of this necessity, our hope is to launch the challenge of responsibility to the institutional actors; a wind of change is already blowing.
