Ethical Innovation In Business And The Economy

Innovation has become a buzzword that promises dramatic changes in almost every field of business. Absent from this attention is a serious discussion of the ethical sides of dramatic change. To address this, editors Georges Enderle and Patrick E. Murphy gather a team of experts to fully examine the ethics of innovation within business and the economy in this standout addition to the Studies in TransAtlantic Business Ethics series.

Firms generally depend upon innovations in order to achieve advantages on competitive markets, thus also raising societal questions. Business ethics provides a normative framework for balancing the different perspectives, values, and interests at stake. This balance must be achieved both at relevant firm and regulatory levels. Business Ethics of Innovation is thus necessarily an interdisciplinary endeavour. This volume assesses general questions of how business ethics may contribute to adequate innovations and specifically discusses respective case studies in pharmaceutical and IT sectors.

Responsible Innovation. For some, this expression is only an oxymoron or, worse, a means of masking with a sheet of virtue economic practices that would otherwise appear selfish and self-interested. For others, theorists and actors of innovation, this expression represents a formidable lever of action and a rich conceptual source from which to draw new ways of innovating. The articulation between different levels of norms – economic and ethical, to which we can add the legal dimension – is not new, and is the subject of an in-depth reflection, decades old, around the idea of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). By taking up some debates on CSR, most of which are foreign to the current authors of responsible innovation, this book examines the various justifications that CSR brings in order to convince economic players, subject to powerful market forces, of their responsible commitment. But these are not enough. The book also explores the specific contribution of the concept of responsible innovation to coping with the technological, social and political breakthroughs generated by innovation, and is based on philosophical resources such as the ethics of virtue and the ethics of “care”.

This Open Access book, Responsible innovation provides benefits for society, for instance more sustainable products, more engagement with consumers and less anxiety about emerging technologies. As a governance tool it is mostly driven by research funders, including the European Commission, under the term “responsible research and innovation” (RRI). To achieve uptake in private industry is a challenge. This book provides successful case studies for the implementation of responsible innovation in businesses. The importance of social innovations is emphasized as a link between benefits for society and profits for businesses, especially SMEs. For corporate industry it is shown how responsible innovation can offer a competitive advantage to adopters. The book is based on the latest insights from theory and practice and combines conceptual work with first-hand experience. It is of interest to innovation managers, entrepreneurs and academics. For academics, the book will provide a combination of analysis and discussion, and present recent learnings from first-hand interaction with entrepreneurs. For innovation managers and entrepreneurs, it will provide inspiration and better ideas about what responsible innovation can look like in practice, why others have “done it” and what the potential benefits might be. The book will thus serve the purposes of spreading the word about the responsible innovation concept among different audiences whilst making it more accessible to innovation managers and entrepreneurs.

The interaction between a company and its stakeholder environment explains a key part of corporate behavior. This is because the level of social acceptance that the company achieves affects consumer trust, employee commitment, and access to credit or support from suppliers. This book examines these relationships to discover the best way to align corporate behaviour with the interests, values and preferences of stakeholders. It features contributions on topics such as marketing, emerging technologies, women in entrepreneurship, sports and tourism.

Volume 25 focuses on challenges and visions in entrepreneurship and ethics. The contributors have provided the latest perspectives on how ethics is impacted by or impacting the field. With a combination of theoretical and conceptual papers, the scholars have created a framework for the ethical challenges in today's global environment.

'. . . well worth reading and absorbing, particularly by teachers of "principles" courses who wish to give their students a more correct perspective on the findings of the economic science of applied welfare economics contained in discussions of cost/benefit analysis, most distributive issues, and evaluations of tax policy.' - Peter Groenewegen, History of Economics Review

This book is the first of its kind – a global overview of extant research on ethics in small and medium sized enterprises. While vast amounts of corporate money, government policy and media time are directed at the social and ethical activities of large corporations, small businesses don’t generally attract the spotlight. This is wildly inappropriate, however, since upward of 90% of private businesses are small or medium sized. This book goes some way to helping us understand the social and ethical contribution of this majority organizational form. The first section of the book is a global round-up of research on ethics in small and medium sized enterprises from major regions of the world. In the second section smaller scale research projects from a variety of countries present both empirical and theoretical advances in the area. Anyone with an interest in ethics and small and medium sized enterprises should find this an inspiring book which paves the way for future research.