From university social-responsibility to social-innovation strategy for quality accreditation and sustainable competitive advantage during COVID-19 pandemic

Heba Mohamed Adel,Ghada Aly Zeinhom,Raghda Abulsaoud Ahmed Younis

doi:10.1108/jhass-04-2021-0086

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to investigate conceptually and empirically the direct and indirect relationships between university social responsibility (USR), university social innovation strategy (USIS) in terms of social awareness (SA), intention for social innovation (ISI), organisational structure for social innovation (SSI) and innovativeness in social value creation (ISVC) and gaining a sustainable competitive advantage (SCA) at quality-accredited faculties of an emerging market.Design/methodology/approachA conceptual model was presented and a mixed-methods approach was exploited to fill a research gap detected in strategic corporate social innovation literature. The authors formed a data collection team that contacted all the quality-accredited public and private/international faculties, of which 109 faculties in 11 Egyptian governorates responded and their quality units filled questionnaires that were analysed by structural equation modelling. For comprehensive understanding, qualitative interviews were set to gather data from managers/leaders and teaching staff working at those faculties in quality management and community engagement practices as well as students.FindingsResults demonstrated that USR positively and significantly influenced SCA and USIS. Further, USIS (in terms of ISI, SSI and ISVC) positively and significantly influenced SCA. However, USIS (in terms of SA) had a positive yet insignificant influence on SCA. Indirectly, USIS was found to be partially mediating USR–SCA relationship.Practical implicationsUniversity leaders/staff can gain insights on how to adopt differentiation strategies, which enable their institutions to shift from being just socially responsible to becoming socially innovative by presenting solutions to social, economic, cultural, environmental and health-care problems/challenges within their communities in general and during pandemics. This can be sustained through developing innovative quality-based processes/programmes/services related to education, research and community outreach that better serve social needs to be quality-accredited and unique over their rivals.Social implicationsSatisfying social needs through promoting innovative processes/services can reinforce a favourable social change.Originality/valueFrom a cross-disciplinary perspective, the authors interwove conceptually sparse literature of strategic, operations, knowledge capacity and innovation management that studied university social innovation research area. Also, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research that examined empirically USR–USIS–SCA relationships of quality-accredited faculties in an emerging economy during Covid-19 pandemic.

Highlights

Corporate social innovation (CSI) has been adopted as a competitive differentiation strategy, which enables businesses to shift from being just socially responsible to becoming socially innovative by presenting solutions to social, economic, cultural and environmental challenges with their innovative processes/products/services (Dionisio and de Vargas, 2020; Gasparin et al, 2021)
In spite of the remarkably growing yet scattered literature on strategic social innovation in the field of production and operations management as well as knowledge capacity and innovation management within the industry, a lesser attention has been directed to such attractive research area in the context of higher education (HE) (Mattera and Baena, 2015; Ziegler, 2017; Bayuo et al, 2020; Dionisio and de Vargas, 2020; Repo and Matschoss, 2020)
Qualitative interviews were held to enhance the depth of understanding (Adel et al, 2018; Adel, 2021) of the promising university social innovation (USI) practices executed in an emerging economy, especially during Covid-19 pandemic

Summary

Introduction

Corporate social innovation (CSI) has been adopted as a competitive differentiation strategy, which enables businesses to shift from being just socially responsible to becoming socially innovative by presenting solutions to social, economic, cultural and environmental challenges with their innovative processes/products/services (Dionisio and de Vargas, 2020; Gasparin et al, 2021). For bridging this research gap, this study examined empirically USR–USIS (USI strategy)–SCA (sustainable competitive advantage) relationships of quality-accredited faculties in an emerging economy during Covid-19 pandemic. At this challenging time, universities formulated innovative competitive and functional strategies to alleviate the negative impact of this threat on the society (DeVaney et al, 2020; Tetrevova et al, 2021). This article investigated conceptually and empirically the direct and indirect relationships between USR, university social innovation strategy (USIS) – in terms of social awareness (SA), intention for social innovation (ISI), organisational structure for social innovation (SSI) and innovativeness in social value creation (ISVC) – and gaining a SCA at quality-accredited faculties of the Egyptian emerging market

Objectives

Methods

Results