By Bill Valentino
Innovative, entrepreneurial and creative thinking are becoming the new core competencies in a MBA toolkit that increasingly connect the skills of leadership and the world of business practice with corporate growth and sustainable business. This underscores the idea that a company's greatest asset may be its creative capital.

As innovation and entrepreneurial thinking become new core competencies, business schools are making time for them in their curriculum. Also using these themes, companies through continuing education, are organizing themselves around knowledge and positioning their organizations for the future. This is happening via corporate learning marked by a proliferation of seminars, workshops, conference-type-study, learning networks and life long learning focused academic programs based on the topics of innovation and entrepreneurial thinking. The objectives for this are best described by MIT Sloan’s statement of purpose for their MBA program, “To develop principled, innovative leaders who improve the world and to generate ideas that advance management practice.”

Corporate social responsibility, innovation and entrepreneurship all share a very important common concept. They all represent attitudes that drive a passion to find a better way.

Innovation always comprises both: a good idea on the one hand and its entrepreneurial implementation on the other. CSR presents a unique chance to combine both elements efficiently. When viewed as know-how, CSR promotes innovative thinking but can also act a means to facilitate the implementation of entrepreneurship.

Connecting CSR to Innovation and Entrepreneurship
The concept of Corporate Social Responsibility has become ubiquitous for businesses in recent years. There is a business case shaped by strategic importance, risk management, reputation and corporate governance that has become the dominant driver for companies to engage in CSR.

But there is another driver emerging, which although remains off the radar screen for the moment, that is gradually framing CSR as a facilitator of innovation and entrepreneurial thinking. These in turn, act as key pillars of sustainable business, as well as mechanisms for adapting business to a rapidly changing world by taking leaps into new directions.

CSR is gradually evolving as a form of divergent thinking, making it more and more a catalyst not just for forging important links between innovation, creative ideas, and entrepreneurship and but also for actually strategically managing and operationalizing CSR in any business setting. It is no longer just about companies behaving ethically and responsibly in their core businesses. Now it includes just as importantly, also how they generate new thinking to create paths to integrate good economic performance with meaningful social or environmental impacts

Renaissance thinking today
If we took a closer look at our rapidly changing world today, we might begin to recognize a number of similarities with one of the most remarkable periods in human history, the Renaissance. This period in fifteenth century Italy was characterized by its remarkable burst of learning, creativity and change. It was a time when barriers between disciplines, concepts and cultures were broken down and a new world was forged based on new learning and new ideas.

Today, in the very interconnected and rapidly changing world we live in, we observe via experiential learning every day how different cultures, domains, and disciplines are streaming together and connecting. This is especially apparent in areas such as business, entertainment, science, and technology and above all through the force of globalization. Today, more than ever, the traditional boundaries between politics, culture, technology, finance, social responsibility and ecology are disappearing rapidly.

This movement is constantly facilitating the combination and also the clash of many established values and concepts. This process has ultimately succeeded in forming a huge amount of inventive ideas and breakthrough technologies as well as innovative responses to social and environmental issues. It has created an explosion of extraordinary innovations based on the success of individuals working in teams or as organizations, bringing together many different concepts, disciplines and cultures and searching for places where they link and connect to bring about systemic change.

The author Frans Johansson, calls these places where connections occur, “intersections” and the explosion of remarkable innovations that occur through these intersections the “Medici Effect”. In this context, using this terminology, the connection between the Renaissance and our modern world is much closer to each other than we could have ever imagined. It is exactly in these intersections of fields, disciplines, or cultures where existing concepts combine into a large number of extraordinary new ideas. These ideas are forging a new world and generating an epicenter of creative explosion, mirroring exactly what once took place during the original Renaissance.

Corporate Social Responsibility as a link
Corporate Social Responsibility is rapidly emerging as a major medium for these intersections, which allows it to play an important role in understanding how to harness their power. By combining social and environmental thinking with business, responsibility and opportunity, CSR brings about leaps in new directions, opens entirely new fields, provides space for people, and companies to become leaders, and provides sources of innovation that can affect the world in unprecedented ways.

By becoming this link, CSR can be much more than just a cost constraint, or a charitable deed. Approached strategically, it generates opportunity, innovation, and competitive advantage for corporations, as well as for the entrepreneurs of today, while at the same time contributing to the solutions of many pressing social and environmental problems.

In this context, CSR is becoming a generator of remarkable idea combinations by not just combining two different concepts into a new idea. It creates a mindset that greatly increases the chances for unusual combinations to occur. In this role CSR becomes a facilitator of deliberate and strategic efforts to create intersections of business, entrepreneurship, profits, reputation, values and branding that generate innovative, creative, and groundbreaking ideas and solutions. Situated within a business framework, these become innovative ways in themselves to meet the challenges of finding new pathways to sustainability and values-based leadership. Above all, it proactively addresses the ever-growing interdependent relationship between business and society and manages the ever-growing expectations of stakeholders.

Innovation finding solutions to problems
Innovation is often defined as the act of introducing something new, but in the context of linking it to CSR it is the process of translating new ideas into tangible societal impacts. Here it can become the successful combination of concepts between multiple fields, generating ideas that leap in new directions as what are called “intersectional ideas” (Johansson) or simply innovations.

The unspoken goal of innovation is to solve a problem, mirroring the basic purpose of CSR when considered from an economic, social, or environmental perspective. Innovation also frequently shows up as an important topic in economics, business, technology, sociology, and engineering but most important it represents a key driver for any economy.

Defining innovation in terms of accomplishing something unique - something no one has ever done before, is a key characteristic. But for a creative idea to be innovative it must also have some measure of relevance. It must be valuable, but even beyond that, something is innovative only when it is implemented and can actually be put to use by others in society. Innovations are intended to make someone or something better off and this fits perfectly with current CSR thinking.

Also innovation has a more direct link to CSR in the form of social innovation. Social Innovation refers to new strategies, concepts, ideas and organizations that meet social needs of all kinds - from working conditions and education to community development and health which also extend to and strengthen civil society.

Social innovation can be used to describe innovations, which have a social purpose such as micro credits. The concept can also be related to social entrepreneurship (entrepreneurship isn't always or even usually innovative, but it can be a means of innovation). Social innovation can take place within governments, within companies, or within the nonprofit sector but it is increasingly the intersection of actions among these three parties that seems to be most effective in fueling innovation itself.

CSR and Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurs are best positioned to understand the remarkable acts of innovation that occur in “intersections”. Their accomplishments are usually the result of successfully connecting fields that were considered unrelated and managing to do so in a meaningful way. Entrepreneurs with enthusiastic visions are the driving force of enterprises where they passionately develop strategies to transform their visions into reality and take responsibility to make those visions become successes.

Regarded as an engine for job creation and economic growth, entrepreneurship is usually defined as the practice of starting new businesses generally based on identified opportunities. But in the context of linking it to CSR, entrepreneurship manifests itself predominantly as a process of discovering, evaluating, and exploiting opportunities in the market place, workplace, and community or in totally new and different areas of thinking.

CSR presents many opportunities that create new perspectives of intersecting important social ideas and business concepts, aimed at enhancing market competitiveness and the common good. These can serve to respond to an ever changing and increasingly complex business environment. Just to name a few of the obvious types of opportunities, here are a few of them: adding value to business, building and protecting reputation, reducing risks, managing stakeholder expectations, building sustainable business, enhancing brand value, creating competitive edge, improving supply chain performance preferred employer status, motivation leading to productivity, and improved environmental performance.

A more tangible manifestation of the link between CSR and entrepreneurship can be observed in the rising trend of social entrepreneurship where an entrepreneur recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change. The measure of performance for social entrepreneurs is not profit or return but rather the impact they have on society. The behavior of the entrepreneur reflects the types of opportunities presented which allows many ideas and concepts to converge to find sustainable solutions and bring about systemic changes.

An example of a well-known contemporary social entrepreneur is Muhammad Yunus, the founder and manager of Grameen Bank and its growing family of social venture businesses based on micro credits. For his achievements he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. His work represents a theme among modern day social entrepreneurs that emphasizes the enormous synergies and benefits of intersecting business principles with social ventures.

CSR, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship in an MBA toolkit
Having innovation and entrepreneurship in a MBA toolkit for CSR is aimed mainly at those operating at the gateway between business, the economy and social, environmental and sustainable development. It is for those who want to possess the skills to take over an interdisciplinary management position, oriented towards innovation, entrepreneurial thinking and CSR. This defines creating the future based on the concept that a capacity for connecting new thinking and new ideas is probably one the most important competitive factors in the business world today.

About the author:
Bill Valentino, continuously working for Bayer in China since 1987, holds a MBA from Thunderbird, the Gavin School of Management, and a MA in Technology and Communications from Columbia University, New York. He co-directs the Tsinghua-Bayer Public Health and HIV/AIDS Media Studies Program and is a Senior Guest Lecturer at the Center for International Communications at Tsinghua University. He is also currently the Chairman of the European Chamber's CSR Working Group and a long-standing member of the AmCham CSR Committee in Beijing.

 Loading ...

Leave A Comment: