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Companies are currently changing their traditional role in society and transforming it into a proactive role in which their operations generate social and environmental positive impacts. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has evolved from simple philanthropy to a more theoretical concept with a new corporate philosophy that takes all the interests of all stakeholders into consideration. The financial market is pushing the development of Socially Responsible Investment (SRI), which has led to the rise of Corporate Sustainability Systems (CSS). These CSSs are tools that rate corporate performance on sustainability. However, they constitute a chaotic universe, with instruments of different nature. This paper identifies and groups the common characteristics of the CSSs into three different typologies: Indexes, Rankings and Ratings. Despite this classification, and although the fundamental pillar of CSR is the “Stakeholder Theory”, CSSs are still not ideal tools to be used by all stakeholders. From the magma of CSSs, this article identifies and describes, through a comparative analysis, those which best comply with the “Stakeholder Theory”. This paper facilitates the work of researchers and stakeholders by exposing the differential characteristics of the most important CSSs.

Tissue engineering (TE) is a dynamic and growing scientific field that merges the knowledge of different areas such as biology, physics, medicine, and engineering. [1] The TE discipline was first coined at a National Science Foundation sponsored meeting in 1987, thus originating a field that employs life sciences and engineering with the purpose of developing biologic or synthetic supports to restore, keep, or enhance tissue functions or damaged organs. [2] The classical TE approach has been mainly focusing on associating cells with a supporting matrix, also called biomaterials or scaffolds, that essentially acts as a passive template for tissue formation in vitro by allowing cells to adhere, migrate, differentiate, and produce tissue. Usually, the cells are seeded onto the scaffolds and, occasionally, growth factors are also added. The combination of cells, growth factors, and scaffold is often referred as the TE triad. [3] Nevertheless, novel approaches in TE that include the application of a biophysical stimuli to the scaffolds through the use of a bioreactor are emerging. [4] Tissue engineering (TE) is a strongly expanding research area. TE approaches require biocompatible scaffolds, cells, and different applied stimuli, which altogether mimic the natural tissue microenvironment. Also, the extracellular matrix serves as a structural base for cells and as a source of growth factors and biophysical cues. The 3D characteristics of the microenvironment is one of the most recognized key factors for obtaining specific cell responses in vivo, being the physical cues increasingly investigated. Supporting those advances is the progress of smart and multifunctional materials design, whose properties improve the cell behavior control through the possibility of providing specific chemical and physical stimuli to the cellular environment. In this sense, a varying set of bioreactors that properly stimulate those materials and cells in vitro, creating an appropriate biomimetic microenvironment, is developed to obtain active bioreactors. This review provides a comprehensive overview on the important microenvironments of different cells and tissues, the smart materials type used for providing such microenvironments and the specific bioreactor technologies that allow subjecting the cells/ tissues to the required biomimetic biochemical and biophysical cues. Further, it is shown that microfluidic bioreactors represent a growing and interesting field that hold great promise for achieving suitable TE strategies.

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