Against Inequality: Towards a Curriculum for Social and Environmental Innovation

A thorough bibliometric analysis is conducted in this study to investigate the state of social and environmental innovation research. The present study aims to identify developing trends, significant concepts, and collaboration networks in the subject by a thorough survey of scholarly literature. The analysis offers a comprehensive picture of the changing conversation around social and environmental innovation by incorporating a wide range of publications, such as reports, conference papers, and journal articles.The data shows a notable rise in publications over time pertaining to social and environmental innovation, indicating the field's increasing significance in tackling global issues. Research on social and environmental innovation is by its very nature interdisciplinary, incorporating elements from the social sciences, economics, business, and environmental science. This multidisciplinary approach makes it possible to fully comprehend difficult problems and come up with creative solutions. The existence of collaborative networks among scholars is highlighted by co-authorship network analysis. These networks make it easier to share knowledge, cross-pollinate concepts, and create all-encompassing solutions. The report highlights a number of topics related to emerging research, such as the role of technology in promoting social and environmental innovation, the circular economy and sustainable business models, inclusive entrepreneurship and social innovation, and sustainable supply chains. Researchers, practitioners, and policymakers can all benefit from the understanding this analysis provides. This information can be used by policymakers to guide the creation of laws that encourage environmental and social innovation. Experts are able to recognize new trends and recommended procedures. Scholars are able to pinpoint gaps in existing research and avenues for further investigation.

The study examines how social and environmental innovations affect cost leadership strategies, value creation, and overall firm/business performance. It has compared how SMEs handle the ever‐changing landscape of sustainability‐driven business practices with large manufacturing companies. With a cross‐sectional design, the study examined 179 manufacturing businesses to test the research framework. A structured questionnaire based on a five‐point Likert scale with organization as a unit of analysis was used to collect data. The research’s measurement and structural models were derived from data analysis conducted using Smart PLS. Overall, the research revealed that environmental and social innovations have significant impacts on business performance through cost leadership strategies and value creation in both SMEs and large manufacturing companies. However, a direct relationship was not established between social innovation and value creation in the case of SMEs, but it was significant for large companies. Environmental innovation was found to have direct relationships with cost leadership and value creation in both SMEs and large manufacturing companies. This research shows managers and policymakers how companies of any size can balance cost leadership with environmental and social concerns to maximize resources and efficiency. It encourages sustainable practices that benefit society and the environment while boosting performance and guiding strategic decision‐making. The novelty of this study is the comparative analysis of SMEs and large companies that provide empirical evidence of the intricate connection between environmental and social innovations, cost leadership, value creation, and business performance.

It is important for practitioners, policymakers, and scholars to understand how the adoption of sustainability strategies and innovations influence firms’ overall performance. Practitioners obviously seek knowledge of the likely financial outcome of the adoption of sustainability strategies and innovations. Policymakers need the knowledge to devise effective policies to reach sustainability goals, and scholars seek to understand firm behavior and their ability to create financial value in the sustainability shift. Even though an increasing amount of empirical evidence indicate that the sustainability-firm performance relationship is positive, much debate remains concerning how and under what conditions firm-level competitiveness is created though sustainability. This study contributes by examining how sustainability strategies influence the implementation of social and environmental innovations in manufacturing firms, and in turn, how these innovations affect firm performance. Firm performance is measured in terms of value creation, cost reduction, and risk reduction, in which both perceived performance and objective longitudinal financial data are used. The study adopts a quantitative research approach using survey data from a representative sample of Norwegian manufacturing firms combined with publicly available financial data. Hypotheses are tested by structural equation modeling (SEM). The results indicate that sustainability strategies elicit a positive effect on the implementation of environmental and social innovations. Furthermore, environmental innovations were found to give a positive effect on all measured firm performance outcomes, while social innovations yielded mixed effects. We discuss the findings in relation to stakeholder and resource-based-view theories and the implications for practice and further research.

Innovative responses are necessary to address persistent and intertwined problems such as poverty, resource degradation, or food insecurity. There is a growing expectation for business to play a proactive role in this, but there are still remarkable gaps in our understanding of how exactly business can generate social and environmental innovation. This book focuses on the business of social and environmental innovation in the African context, where these issues are particularly relevant but even less well understood. The following chapter sets the scene by introducing the key concepts and issues at stake. We argue that the emergence of social and environmental innovation is often associated with individual efforts of social entrepreneurs, organizational transformation in incumbent businesses, and/or cross-sector partnerships as collective efforts. This is reflected in the sequence of the chapters in this volume. We identify four cross-cutting themes which are addressed in some way or other by each of the contributing chapters: (1) social innovation as a process or outcome; (2) mapping and scaling up innovations; (3) tension between social purpose and profit generation; and (4) socio-economic and institutional context.

PurposeWhile prosocial motives are found to be conducive to unique manager behaviors, the literature lacks empirical evidence on the relationships between prosocial motives and managers’ willingness to engage in environmental and social innovation (ESI) in business-to-business (B2B) firms and the boundary conditions that shape these relationships. This research endeavors to unlock the potential of prosocial motives in fostering ESI, while investigating the mediating roles of creativity-relevant skills and the moderating influence of business moral values.Design/methodology/approachUsing a quantitative survey approach, we gathered insights from 242 managers within Australia’s food and beverage industry. The authors tested their hypotheses by adopting a covariance-based structural equation modeling approach.FindingsFirst, prosocial motives drive the ESI behaviors of managers in B2B firms. Second, creativity-relevant skills act as the critical bridge connecting prosocial motives with ESI within the realm of B2B firms. Third, business moral values emerge as potent moderating, positively influencing the relationship between prosocial motives and “managers’ willingness to engage in social innovation” within B2B firms.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study examining the relationship between prosocial motives and social and environmental innovation and how this relationship is influenced by creative-relevant skills and business moral values.

Social entrepreneurship is a mix of sectoral innovation and resource availability by which social problems are treated as the ones handicapping a societie’s needs. It is a new dimension of the business sector. In Nepal, like everywhere in the world, a model of social entrepreneurship has been developed by several social innovators. The main aim of this research is to analyze the sectoral social entrepreneurship and innovation practices in Nepal. This paper is based on scientific review with reference to the social entrepreneurship and innovation in the context of Nepal economy. This subject matter is highly recognized due to its broad scope in terms of educational innovation, business innovation, environmental innovation, social innovation, financial innovation, technical innovations, innovations in all the sectors of economy, and, finally, innovations in the living standard of Nepalese people. Nepal needs social and economic transformation, which can be made by building socially responsive citizens. Thus, the context of Nepal suggests an opportunity for sectoral and structural innovations. Social innovations can make Nepal smart and strong. So, the government should create the environment for the social enterprise sector in Nepal.

The proposal below provides a special emphasis on the relationship between businesses and natural environment. It is argued that the inclusion of environmental criteria to business activities promotes the creation of new core competencies, offering a creative and innovative perspective to the organization that can lead to the achievement of sustainable competitive advantages. More specifically, we analyze both the existence of a direct relationship between Environmental Innovation and Firm Performance and the existence of an indirect relationship between the two, which highlights the mediating role of the kind of competitive advantage generated. It also provides an innovative approach, as it explains the Environmental Innovation from the literature on Social Innovation, considering Environmental Innovation as an expression of Social Innovation through the incorporation of ethical arguments to products, processes and organizational modes of the company. The main contributions of this work can be summarized as follows: (1) It explains the nature of Environmental Innovation through the Social Innovation literature, which allows consideration of some key aspects of administrative and technological innovations that have not been taken into account the academic literature. (2) The different types of environmental innovations are analyzed as a necessary step to understand the strategic options in the environmental field. (3) Environmental Innovation is related to business performance. The practical implications of the relationship between environmental innovation and performance are of great importance, since it directly influence the type of environmental strategy chosen, allowing the company to choose from innovative strategies (based on pollution prevention) or more conservative strategies (emissions control).

Should universities play a greater role in the delivery of emergency medicine specialty education and training? No.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to analyze the influence of corporate support programs on managers' environmental and social innovation behaviors. To offer a more comprehensive understanding of these relationships, the moderating role of technological reflectiveness and business moral values is also accounted for.Design/methodology/approachA scenario-based experimental study to test the impact of corporate support programs on environmental and social innovation behaviors is also adopted. After running a pretest to verify the effectiveness of alternative scenarios through 100 respondents with managerial experience residing in the UK and EU countries, we collected data from a sample of 220 senior managers of firms from the Australian food and beverage industry for the main study. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) with Dunnett's test to investigate direct relationships and the PROCESS Model to test the moderating role of technological reflectiveness and business moral values were used.FindingsThe findings reveal time provision, budget provision and advice provision as salient forms of corporate support programs that positively impact managers' environmental and social innovation behaviors. It is found that technological reflectiveness positively moderates the link between time provision and managers' social innovation behavior and negatively moderates the link between advice provision and managers' social innovation behavior. Furthermore, it is found that business moral values positively moderate the relationships between time and budget provisions and managers' environmental innovation behavior and between budget and advice provisions and managers' social innovation behavior.Originality/valueThe authors contribute to innovation and operations management research by adopting a behavioral operations management perspective and empirically analyzing the influences of managers' technological reflectiveness and business moral values on the relationship between organizational corporate support programs and managers' environmental and social innovation behavior in the context of the food and beverage industry.

Social innovation and environmental innovation is a fast‐growing phenomenon. More and more businesses are trying to understand how social and environmental innovation can help their business model. The purpose of this paper is to examine the contribution of community involvement toward social and environmental innovation to achieve sustainable tourism development. Perceptions of 650 local community members of different tourist destinations of Jammu and Kashmir have been used to meet the objectives of the study. The structural equation modelling (SEM) technique has been used for determining the structural estimates between constructs with the help of Statistical Package for the Social Science (SPSS) and Analysis of Moment Structure (AMOS) software. Hypothesis testing revealed a positive impact of community involvement on social and environmental innovation. The results also depicted a positive impact of social and environmental innovation on sustainable tourism development.

This paper focuses on the social and environmental innovations of Brazilian companies, rather than on merely economic innovations. These innovations are discussed within the context of sustainability. Data were collected via a qualitative and descriptive study from the annual Guia Exame de Sustentabilidade magazine (2014 Edition). The magazine stated that 228 companies responded to the questionnaire. Of these, 61 companies stood out in Brazil for their policies and practices in sustainability and had their results published. The social innovations were geared towards meeting the needs of the surrounding communities. Environmental innovations appeared in greater numbers, connoting a higher stage of attention and interest from Brazilian companies. Environmental innovations were intended to evolve or improve processes and products and to reduce the consumption of resources.

ABSTRACTGreen finance serves as a pivotal instrument in advancing sustainable performance by mobilizing capital toward environmentally responsible initiatives and enhancing social value creation; thus, how organizations can effectively contribute to environmental and social performance has concerned the attention of legislators and policymakers. The current study employed GMM‐based Quantile to evaluate the heterogeneous effects of sustainable financial practices. Moreover, the dynamic and nonlinear relationships across different distributional characteristics of both variables were examined by Quantile on Quantile (QQR) model. The analysis incorporates a sample of 451 non‐financial firms listed on the S&P 1500 index over the period 2013–2023, with firm‐level data sourced from the Refinitiv DataStream platform. The empirical findings indicate that green finance practices potentially contribute to both environmental and social innovation performance. Furthermore, the realization of responsible production and consumption can be effectively facilitated through green investment practices. On the other hand, findings from the QQR analysis reveal that green finance exhibits an asymmetric influence on community development and employee well‐being. The empirical results substantially validate the Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis under environmental innovation, whereas social innovation underpins stakeholders' theory.

Social Innovation Promoting Policy and its Implementation in the European Union

This study investigates Artificial Intelligence (Awareness, Knowledge, Empowerment, Implementation) on competitiveness and the mediating role of innovations (Social Innovation, Environmental Innovation, and Technological Innovation). We employed the Open Innovation theory (OIT). The data from 480 SMEs were analyzed using SmartPLS. The findings elucidate that the relationship between AI (awareness, empowerment, implementation) and competitiveness is positively significant. Also, there is a partial mediation effect between AI awareness and competitiveness. Technological innovation partially mediates between AI (Implementation and Knowledge) and competitiveness. Policymakers should initiate strategies to integrate AI innovations. The study extends the OIT to create new technological, social and environmental innovations.

A systematic review of surveys on undergraduate teaching of Geriatrics in medical schools in the XXI century