Abstract
Sustainable corporate development can be understood as a strategy that respects not only economic goals but also environmental and social aspects, weigh against each other and thus, ensures the long-term business success. The number of enterprises that are oriented towards corporate sustainability has increased in recent years, but the implementation still encounters a variety of limits. The goal of this chapter is the development of an integrated approach to foster sustainable development on the corporate level. In this context, not only tangible resources (e.g. raw material, energy or machines) but in particular intangible resources (e.g. expertise and professional competence of the employees, corporate culture or relations with stakeholders) are considered key success factors for a sustainable corporate development. For its application, the integrated approach provides a set of instruments and procedures, which can be used for the purpose of analysis, planning, controlling and reporting of sustainable corporate development.
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Notes
- 1.
Various concepts are used in the sustainability literature to operationalize the concept of resources at company level. Some authors use so-called capital approaches (e.g. IIRC 2013; SIGMA 2003; White 2010). Also in the discussion about intellectual capital, intangible resources in particular are divided into different types of capital (e.g. Alwert et al. 2013; Edvinsson and Malone 1997).
- 2.
For the development of the performance indicator catalogue to promote sustainable corporate development, several KPI collections (e.g. Alwert et al. 2013; Global Reporting Initiative [GRI] 2013; Kaldschmidt 2009; Kohl 2007; VDI 2016) were analysed and evaluated systematically. Based on interim results, expert surveys were conducted among company representatives and scientists from various disciplines in order to prioritise particularly meaningful indicators. Selected results have been incorporated into the catalogue of indicators presented here. For more details on the process and for a more detailed list of indicators see Orth (2016).
- 3.
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Orth, R., Kohl, H., Galeitzke, M. (2020). Sustainable Corporate Development: A Resource-Oriented Approach. In: Matos, F., Vairinhos, V., Salavisa, I., Edvinsson, L., Massaro, M. (eds) Knowledge, People, and Digital Transformation. Contributions to Management Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40390-4_12
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