This paper answers several calls for research to devise a framework for incorporating ethics into a company's processes and strategies for innovation. With the principal goal of organizations being "survival" in the long-term, it is assumed that innovation is necessary in order to realize a going concern. Firms that do not innovate and adapt to rapidly changing business environments are less likely to be sustainable. Thus, it is in a business' best interests to adopt an innovation process for long-term success. We posit that there are two simultaneous sources of innovation and change that are unavoidable and embedded in the corporate landscape. First, we argue for genetically embedded, Darwinian explanations for adaptations that enable an entity's survival. This view is combined with more conventional, social science explanations for change. Our new, comprehensive model of the governance of innovation processes hinges on an organization's long-term orientation, which we argue, is not possible without a consideration of an ethical dimension. The roots of the ethic within innovation are traced from both natural science forces for change, and cultural pressures operating on members of an organization. We present our Integrated Causal Model of Innovation and propose theoretical relationships that will generate numerous avenues for future research in the field.
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The research work, explained in this paper, examines the sustainable development dimension of European Multinational Enterprises by focusing on the question of the assessment of their SD-policies, normally presented by them as the result of a moral and not only legal or economic commitment. In order to find a scientific answer to this question the research team has chosen to combine an empirical research on the 50 biggest European Multinational Enterprises composing the DJ EURO STOXX 50 with the scope of descriptive ethics. The perspective of descriptive ethics permits to integrate the (empirically observable) official reference of European MNEs SD-policy to morals without being obliged to develop (or implicitly impose) an own normative position. The empirical research examines three fields of commitment indicators: the reporting system, the organisational structure of the companies and the market of ethical investment. The results encompass expected facts but also surprises. The fact that the reporting refers predominantly to topics which are imposed by the legal framework and that environmental indicators are present in the different reports, confirm the expectations of the researchers. The surprise comes from the observation of the market of ethical investment, where one can observe that SRI-fund managers do not take SRI-indexes into consideration in their daily decisions. The place of SD inside the organisational structure of the 50 European MNE is obviously not defined the same way everywhere. Many companies give SD-management a project character, some have created a specific structure, and other MNE have integrated it into other management areas. Interpreting the results by maintaining a link to the moral SD-commitment of the MNEs is possible inside a descriptive ethics-approach, which shows the different possibilities to judge if the moral SD-commitment of the European MNEs is serious or not.
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