Responsabilité sociétale et développement durable

Why do small businesses in developing countries embrace sustainable business practices and what are the effects on their performance? We address these questions by drawing on the natural-resource based view of the firm to argue that the environmental sustainability orientation of small businesses can be explained by their entrepreneurial orientation. Our study of 197 small businesses in the Philippines shows that an entrepreneurial strategic orientation enables them to develop a more proactive stance toward environmental sustainability practices which lead to superior firm performance. The implications of the findings for future research and for public policy for small businesses are also discussed.

Publication date: Available online 26 August 2016
Source:Long Range Planning

Author(s): Sergio W. Carvalho, Bruno Silvestre, Peggy Cunningham

Innovation has long been known to drive growth. There is a growing body of evidence that firms that work to be responsible and produce more sustainable products also receive positive benefits, but how and why these benefits accrue is less well established. Our research addresses this knowledge gap and furthers an understanding of the conditions under which consumers will pay a premium price. We compare consumer responses to a price increase for an innovation with individual, societal, or mutual benefits. We examine a more holistic model than those previously examined, and test for mediation and moderation so that the importance and relative impact of the different factors can be better understood. Our findings have relevance for practitioners and academics. With regard to the latter, we extend the literatures on perceptions of price fairness and equity theory, salience, and pro-social behavior.

Publication date: Available online 20 August 2016
Source:Long Range Planning

Author(s): Murad A. Mithani

In this study we use the stakeholder theory and the attention-based view to investigate two questions: Do investments in ecological and social environments yield comparable economic returns as investments in R&D? Are there economic benefits to pursuing R&D, ecological and social investments simultaneously? Using a longitudinal sample of 5999 Indian firms, we find an ordering of implications such that R&D has a significantly larger impact on economic performance than contribution to the ecological environment, which in turn has a stronger effect than charitable and community contributions. Moreover, we find that ecological and social contributions weaken the effect of R&D, which suggests that managerial attention to innovation can be undermined by a greater emphasis on social responsibility. Our study illustrates the difficulty of simultaneous attention to innovation and social responsibility.

The aim of this study is to analyze the process of academic spin-off creation, identifying the barriers to suggest how to overcome them. For this purpose, a case study method was adopted, and as data-collecting instruments, several in-depth interviews and documentary analysis were used from three academic spin-offs. The empirical evidence captures the different views of the founding researchers of the academic spin-offs, the researching lecturers in the department creating the spin-offs and the manager of the technology transfer office at the Portuguese university studied here. The results show that the different perceptions of barriers are seen to be solved through an internal strategy within the university. The findings also show that applied research should be valued in assessing lecturers, as it contributes, not only to the link with industry, and therefore to regional development, but also to universities' sustainability, overcoming the lack of financial support as a result of constant budget cuts. The contact networks resulting from universities' links with the different stakeholders will benefit the spin-offs themselves, facilitating their survival in the first years of their life.