-> Valuation of waste: a social economy project
-> Corporate Social Responsibility Communication
-> The co-creation between the company and its stakeholders as creation source of shared value
-> Skills development of responsible leaders
-> Towards an ethics of embodied and personified finance - a financial sector at the service of citizens?
Valuation of the waste: a social economy project
LSM representative: Valérie Swaen
Interdisciplinary project developed by the Experimental Farm of the UCL - Centre A. Marbaix (coordinator: Gérard Collignon with Yvan Larondelle - AGRO / SST / ISV-ELI).
Collaborations with teachers and researchers from different disciplines to ensure the successful completion of the project and its sustainability.
The project is supported by the service of the Council to society (CSES).
The project aims at developing an economic and social proximity circuit by optimizing the production of mushrooms (oyster mushrooms) from household waste such as coffee grounds.
It is implemented in the framework of sustainable development ("blue economy”) according to which the coffee grounds are harvested from the consumers in Louvain-la-Neuve and used as a substrate to produce mushrooms that are consumed by the same consumers. The blue economy comes from a new economic approach drawing on natural ecosystems, where waste becomes the necessary resource to create activity, jobs, strengthen social capital and contribute to the growth of income while preserving the environment.
As a technology and learning platform, the center of Marbaix follows the three missions of service, teaching and research in interaction with and through activities of a hundred researchers from UCL and external partners in various fields. This new project will contribute to support new educational initiatives (learning projects) and initiate master’s thesis in the areas of Science and Technology and Human sciences. The objective is to bring together different researchers in a platform of competences around mushroom: cultivation and production, human nutrition, food quality, distribution channels and marketing, expectations and changing consumer behavior, toxicology, bio-remediation, pharmacology…
Corporate social responsibility communication
Responsible: Valérie Swaen, Kristina Artenyan
Collaborations: Catherine Janssen and Ruben Chumpitaz (IESEG School of Management), Joëlle Vanhamme (EDHEC), Shuili Du (University of New Hampshire)
Since the early 2000s, an important debate hits the research on CSR communication, whose main purpose is to determine whether or not a company should be interested to communicate about its socially responsible initiatives and, if it is , whether the traditional tools of marketing are appropriate for it. The fear of being criticized by increasingly informed stakeholders is one argument against CSR Communication because the best intentions seem often to be questioned when communicated. However, most research conclude that CSR should be part of corporate communications.
Even when the company is convinced of the value of communicating about its CSR activities, many questions remain open such as «how to communicate" in a credible way (what communication channels? What kinds of messages? What tone?). While some firms are trying to provide real efforts in terms of their social responsibilities (by changing their practices), others see it as an opportunity for additional profit and do not try to make genuine CSR effort. The latter often chooses to only “look” like responsible companies. How to communicate then in a credible way in a marketplace where all companies - good and bad - are trying to highlight their responsible activities to increasingly skeptical consumers eager to know always more and more information about their CSR efforts?
As part of the Louvain CSR Network, we particularly explore the following questions:
- Is it better to favor a rational appeal (facts and figures characterized by objectivity) rather than an emotional one (generating mainly positive emotions)?
- What is the role of the different execution elements of the advertising (eg. Presence of a label, colors used, tone of the message) on the credibility of the message?
- When, how and why using a humoristic appeal affects consumer responses to an advertisement about company’s CSR activities?
- To what extent and how can companies leverage the dialogue and participation tools offered by social media to raise awareness and engage consumers 2.0 in their CSR-related initiatives?
The co-creation between the company and its stakeholders as creation source of shared value
Responsible: Valérie Swaen
Collaboration: François Maon (IESEG School of Management)
A growing number of companies, researchers, and institutions nowadays analyze issues linking innovations, CSR and value creation for the company and the society as a whole. This axis will focus on the concept of co-creation of responsible innovations, which concerns the processes of innovation emerging from the interaction between the company and its stakeholders. In this context, we analyze how the adoption of CSR principles and objectives of creation of shared value encourages the development of organizational and strategic innovation’s co-creation (i.e, the specific collective learning processes and the know-how between the company and its environment). How co-creation of innovation does emerge from the adoption of CSR principles and from the integration of stakeholder expectations in the strategic objectives of the company's processes?
Skills development of responsible leadership
Responsible: Ina Ehnert
Companies have nowadays considerable power to act on a global scale because they master and use most of the economic creativity resources: scientific and technologic knowledge, finance, organizational, managerial and commercial skills, informational and communicational networking. This can clearly raise the question of their social responsibilities and bring more and more companies to question their cultures, their strategies, and practices, manufacturing process or their products / services.
In this context, Pless and Maak Stahl (2011) identified four challenges for the leaders of tomorrow: (1) the challenge of sustainability - the investigation for balance between the present ecological, social and economic requirements and those for future generations, (2) the ethical challenge - managing the complex ethical issues and moral dilemmas, (3) the citizen challenge - political co-responsibility with regard to global issues of human rights, of Social justice and of environmental protection, and (4) the challenge of diversity – managing the multiple and often conflicting interests of company’s stakeholder.
Today and even more tomorrow, we need a new type of leader able to develop and operate a change in culture for a more ethical and sustainable development; able to create a social legitimacy that is missing desperately to certain companies; capable of managing the tensions between the economic, environmental and social areas; able to handle ethical dilemmas in a multicultural context, and finally, able to act as a committed citizen and participate to the debate on the common good and directions of our future. Responsible Leadership engages the whole person: mind, heart and spirit. This means deploying its intellectual but also emotional and spiritual potential.
Although we know the challenges of leadership of tomorrow, we still know little about how to develop the skills of future leaders. In this context, we analyze what are the specific skills of a "socially responsible leader" in terms of knowledge, know-how, attitudes and behaviors? How to develop and promote these skills in universities and in developing programs for young talents?
Responsible: Mikaël Petitjean
Although necessary, the establishment of codes of ethics and CSR programs in the financial sector is nevertheless largely insufficient. The many excesses and abuses that the financial sector went through since the crisis of "sub primes", clearly demonstrate this.
Banks often speak of ethics and social responsibility in order to improve their image with the public, without seeking to fundamentally change their business culture. The issue is the personified ethics of the bank’s top-manager, his/her determination to reconcile economic performance and human performance and not the disembodied ethics of a "financial group". It is the manager who must lead the ethical approach in the bank. The example must come from the individual and from higher hierarchical levels than from elsewhere.
Faced with such a statement, how can we bring coherence to the strategy of a banking group, its organization and the virtuous behavior of its top-managers? How can we support the management committees in the definition and formalization of a responsible and ethical corporate culture? How do we train the management committees to implement responsible leadership model? How can we support the bank executives to define their personal leadership model consistent with their personality type?