CSR is generally spoken of in terms of responsibility and legal compliance. What we need to think about though is CSR’s potential to transform markets.
Innovation comes from the ethical minnows of the market place, from the field of social enterprise. Look at Café Direct or Ecover. And what opens the door for large companies to this kind of grassroots innovation is corporate venturing.
I’d like to see more big businesses taking on commercial partnerships with social enterprises, and making long-term patient investment. I’m not talking about charitable programmes here, but a learning programme that will help corporations develop new services and products with genuine market value.
The voluntary sector is very creative but it lacks the financial capital and sometimes the know-how to take innovation through to the next phase. That’s where businesses come in. Companies are the experts at the second phase – reaping dividends from innovation to win market share.
I would set quite a simple but practical vision to grow the responsible market from sales of around £14bn, a total market share of about 1.6%, to sales of £50bn by 2006, 5% of the market share.
As to the role that consumers play in all this, the small but very active and informed consumers play a critical role in the early stages of innovation. Café Direct, for example, succeeded without advertising. It’s consumers connecting with each other that helped to spread the message and pull products like this into the market place.
Successful CSR leads to innovation, and takes market share in the same way as successful products like unleaded petrol, or ultra low sulphur diesel.
CSR is about market share but also ultimately about market transformation.
Editorial Comment
Ed Mayo will be speaking at the up-coming conference, Corporates and Communities, on 10-11 September in Birmingham. For more information about the event contact the Charities Aid Foundation events team on 01732 520 074. http://www.ccinet.org/cciconference.cfm
COMMENTS