Sustainable Business Fischer, Manuel; Foord, Daniel; Frecè, Jan ...
2023, 2023.
eBook
Odprti dostop
This open access book is a compact guide to the development of sustainable business, which has become the central concept in discussions about the future development of humanity and planet earth. It ...provides basic terminology and concepts on sustainable business and offers insights into a new management paradigm that integrates social and environmental dimensions into business models, strategies, and operations. New business concepts such as the donut economy, the circular economy, social innovation and sustainable leadership are introduced and the book outlines how they influence the way we run businesses today and in the future. This book lays the foundation for new management thinking in business and academia, making it a essential reader for professionals and students alike.
Data driven businesses, services, and even smart cities of tomorrow depend on access to data not only from machines, but also personal data of consumers, clients, citizens. Sustain-able utilization ...of such data must base on legal compliancy, ethical soundness, and consent. Data subjects nowadays largely lack empowerment over utilization and monetization of their personal data. To change this, we propose a tokenized ecosystem of personal data (TokPD), combining anonymization, referencing, encryption, decentralization, and functional layering to establish a privacy preserving solution for processing of personal data. This tokenized ecosys-tem is a more generalized variant of the smart city ecosystem described in the preceding publi-cation "Smart Cities of Self-Determined Data Subjects" (Frecè & Selzam 2017) with focus to-wards further options of decentralization. We use the example of a smart city to demonstrate, how TokPD ensures the data subjects’ privacy, grants the smart city access to a high number of new data sources, and simultaneously handles the user-consent to ensure compliance with mod-ern data protection regulation.
The paper presents an implementation of the fishpond experiment as a means to help the development of a first-hand experience of the implications of individual and group behavior to the tragedy of ...commons. Apart from its value to teaching purposes, we see the value for exploring the potential of scaling up and transfer of its deployment to a broader audiences not only in the educational curricula but also for professional development of future generations of environmentally conscious and responsible managers and corporate decision-makers.
Although a plethora of alternatives exist, companies often base their sustainability efforts more or less explicitly on the definition of the Brundtland Commission. There are, however, conceptual ...problems when this definition is removed from its original context, in which it addresses social policies and state institutions. In particular the notions of "needs of the present" and "future generations" reveal the qualitative differences between the socio-political context of the Brundtland Commission and the corporate context. In this paper, we explore the entailing dilemmas, argue why current approaches to solve them are insufficient and analyse common practices for sustainability-related statements of 50 companies in Switzerland. The results support the argument that companies tend to avoid a specific definition of corporate sustainability or transpose the Brundtland definition, instead. Both approaches are inappropriate as guiding principles for corporate policy. Instead, we propose basing the concept of sustainability on the broad premise that "the future is a better, healthier place than the present", specified and substantiated using functionally formulated corporate values. These corporate values and the vision of a "better place" derived from them gear corporate sustainability efforts towards restitution and/or compensation.
Smart Cities depend on data from numerous different sources to live up to their full potential. Adding personal data from private sources to a smart city's resources significantly increases this ...potential. Sustainable utilisation of such data must base on legal compliancy, ethical soundness, and consent of the providing data subjects. They have to be assured that their personal data will not be used for anything beyond the scope they agreed to, and that it will not suffer from any additional risk exposure. For this we propose a solution for self-determined data subjects (SDDS), which keeps the private and personal data at their decentralized, safe locations, without depriving the smart city from the information contained within. SDDS achieves this with strict compartmentalization of its different system elements, by exclusively storing non-mnemonic indices and IDs in a public ledger, and by sending mere analytical results, yet no original data across the network. Such a setup ensures the data subjects' privacy, grants the smart city access to a high number of new data sources, and simultaneously handles the user-consent to ensure compliance with data protection laws.
Many corporations define values and publish them in their yearly reports or on their websites. Managers see the benefit of having corporate values. This article critically evaluates the idea of ...corporate values and presents a set of criteria that functional corporate values should meet. We will show how corporate values contribute to the identity of a company and signal its identity to society, thus providing a base for its “license to operate”. This concept of corporate values was assessed empirically with the self-stated values of 50 Swiss companies. We show that many companies have an insufficient concept of corporate values and, if stated at all, they are in many cases dysfunctional. It can be concluded that there is a knowing-doing gap but also a pronounced lack of knowledge regarding corporate values. More research is recommended to address the perception of the function of values from a managerial point of view.
PDF
