The Relationship Between Corporate Social Responsibility and Co-Benefit Business Model Innovation

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The co-benefit business model innovation is a potential business strategy for pursuing value creation for multiple stakeholders and sustainable business development. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has significant implications for the co-benefit business model innovation during crises. Using a grounded coding approach in multiple cases, this study elaborates on how pure commercial CSR, normalized CSR, advanced CSR, and pure CSR constitute different CSR combinations, and how CSR combinations influence the co-benefit business model innovation and bring about the ultimate effects. Using a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, this study draws the following conclusions: As enterprises grow in size and the social environment improves, enterprises gradually shift their focus from pure commercial CSR to high-level CSR, eventually placing greater emphasis on advanced CSR and pure CSR. Enterprises with strong economic goals should drive co-benefit business model innovation through highly normalized CSR and advanced CSR. Enterprises with general economic goals should promote co-benefit business model innovation through highly advanced CSR. Enterprises with high economic expectations of co-benefit business model should consider both highly commercial CSR and normalized CSR, while enterprises with highly advanced CSR and co-benefit business model innovation tend to generate high social benefits. Finally, the study provides recommendations for enterprises on how to scientifically undertake CSR based on the resource endowment and staged development needs and strike to achieve the co-benefit targets.