Business alignment for the “Decade of Action”

Organizational Agility and Communicative Actions for Responsible Innovation: Evidence from manufacturing firms in South Korea

Responsible Innovation (RI) has increasingly attracted attention in academic research and business practice for UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Especially, the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) highlights RI as a key concept to address how to institutionalize and organize action programs to solve grand challenges. However, we know little about the determinants of organizing RI in business. By applying agile management and stakeholder theory, this study proposes the critical organizational factors to implement RI, namely: Organizational Agility and Communicative Actions. Based on the large-scale data analysis of 13,234 South Korean manufacturing firms during the period between 1999 and 2019, this paper investigates whether and how organizational factors can affect RI in the Asian context, using the zero-inflated negative binomial regression model. Findings show that well-organized agile management and communicative actions with stakeholders are essential to enhance RI performance in a holistic view. This study contributes to the recently emerging field of RI and offers novel theoretical and practical implications for academics and practitioners regarding the underlying mechanism of organizing RI.

An Analysis of the Progress of Japanese Companies’ Commitment to the SDGs and Their Economic Systems and Social Activities for Communities

Japanese companies are making rapid progress in addressing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and there is growing interest in the relationship between these goals and financial performance. Moreover, the promotion of the SDGs at the local level encourages opportunities for collaboration with companies. This study analyzed the relationship between the status of SDG efforts and the financial data, as well as social activity data of 533 Japanese manufacturing companies from 2016 to 2020. In terms of academic contribution, this study provides a unique case study in Japan, with consideration of the timing of the initiation of SDG efforts. The results showed that large companies and companies with high profitability tended to start working on the SDGs at an early stage. The results of a comparison of industries showed that the timing of the initiation of SDG initiatives is not affected by profitability in the food and electrical equipment sectors, where SDG efforts are already well underway. From the results of multiple regression analysis, it was found that large companies with high profitability that have implemented social activities tend to be early adopters of the SDGs. The results of this analysis suggest that it is important to design measures that are appropriate based on the size of the focal company and that social contribution activities should be incentivized to encourage companies to act on the SDGs.

The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals: Can multinational enterprises lead the Decade of Action?

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted in 2015 by all UN member states and have been embraced by many multinational enterprises (MNEs) and international NGOs. They created a ‘hybrid governance’ platform in which companies, governments, NGOs, and knowledge institutes can work on achieving common goals through targeted action and serve as the leading global sustainable development framework until 2030. By the year 2020, however, progress towards the goals proved slow, prompting the UN to announce a ‘Decade of Action’. The slow or limited adoption and implementation of the SDG Agenda by MNEs – in close interaction with government policies – is one of the root causes for delayed progress. The question is no longer ‘why’ MNEs should develop sustainability strategies, but rather ‘how’. A number of related questions arise. What have been the roles of MNEs in progress towards the SDGs, what is needed from them in the future, and what can be the role of international business (IB) scholarship in shaping discussion and action? This Special Issue tackles these questions from four angles: (1) identifying and helping to fill theoretical gaps in IB research on the SDGs; (2) asking which SDGs and targets provide promising venues for societally relevant IB research topics; (3) assessing and helping to fill empirical gaps by using, complementing, and upgrading relevant SDG indicators; and (4) showing how IB research and policy practice can become better aligned.