Document Type
Article
Publication Date
6-17-2024
Abstract
Commitments of “getting to zero” or becoming a regenerative company are raising investor, customer, and employee expectations at a time when businesses are struggling just to reduce negative impacts. Executives are increasingly caught between wanting to build a better world and the reality of managing value-add activities that continue to harm people and the environment. Businesses need to distinguish between three types of innovation impacts to maintain their credibility and legitimacy. The first is doing less harm, where the goal is to minimize social wrongs and reduce ecological footprints. The second is incremental positive impact, where the goal is to increase prosperity, regenerate nature, and improve wellbeing through initiatives that are typically of limited scope. The third is system-wide positive impact, where scalable business innovations have a discernible capacity to “move the needle” on social and global challenges such as climate change and social equity. This conceptual paper provides a framework for assessing business innovations by type of impact and the high-leverage points needed to create desired change at the scale of the whole.
Keywords
business and society, corporate legitimacy, organizational behavior
Language
English
Publication Title
Business and Society Review
Rights
© 2025 The Author(s). This is an Open Access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Laszlo, C., Cooperrider, D., & Fry, R. (2024). Business innovation as a force for good: From doing less harm to positive impact type 1 and type 2. Business and Society Review, 129(2), 168–184. https://doi.org/10.1111/basr.12360
Manuscript Version
Final Publisher Version