Social Innovation and the Future of Business and Business Education

Abstract

We are witnessing the fracturing of the traditional business system. Global governments demand business to not only focus on financial outcomes but rather advance progress towards the sustainable development goals. Customers of all ages but especially of the millenial and younger cohorts are pressuring companies towards more ethical business practices. Investors like Larry Fink demand long term oriented management. The business roundtable in the United States feels it needs to revoke the tenets of shareholder value maximization and reuissues their statement on the purpose of the corporation to be stakeholder value creation. While these trends are occuring at the surface level and many observers remain very cynical we argue that there is a deeper shift occuring. Some observers call it a shift in consciousness and argue that we witness a new paradigm emerge. In the Fall of 2018 a number of thought and action leaders gathered in Tarrytown, NY at the invitation of the Gabelli School of Business to explore the deeper shifts occuring. The concept of social innovation provided the brackets and organizing focus of the conference. Five subcontexts were explored in separate tracks by teams of 5-6 participants. The first track focused on the notion of dignity as an central concept to explain the paradigm shift occuring. Dignity is often used as a casual termwithstanding its potential power as a foundational organizing principle. Scholars have argued that dignity can be as foundational a concept as utility has been to think about organizing economic and political affairs. The track explored this proposition and discussed the notion of human dignity as cornerstone of innovative efforts. Dignity understood as that which is beyond price and intrinsically valuable challenges traditional and dominant theories of organizing, including innovation. Some of the questions this track explored were related to how we can manage to protect dignity and what kind of innovation processes do managers need to engage with to foster social innovation that honors, protects, promotes and restores dignity. Michael Pirson was joined by Erica Steckler of the

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