Maximizing corporate social innovation to enhance social and shareholder value: A systems thinking model of industry transformation

Abstract

While the literature on corporate social innovation suggests that value is co-created by different parties at the individual, organizational, and societal level, there is little work focusing on how these levels interface with one another. This paper helps to fill that gap by using systems thinking to develop a general causal model that explains one pathway for how individual corporate social innovations can impact interorganizational dynamics, encouraging the co-creation of social value by multiple parties within an industry while reinforcing the economic case within the initiating firm. We ground this model in the existing literature, and present historical case studies supporting its viability in practice. Overall, we offer the model as a starting point for understanding how initiatives in the private sector might reverberate across organizations in both the private and public sector to create shared value.