The Desirability of a Future Integrated Reporting in the Study of Social and Innovative Practices

Abstract

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been considered the materialisation of ethics in organisations. CSR practices reflect companies’ non-financial aspects, such as social and environmental issues. The proposal of an integrated report that jointly presents financial and non-financial issues would provide a global view of business activity, which will allow for analysis of the relationships and interactions among financial and non-financial resources involved in value creation, including human, social and relational, natural, and intellectual capital. If these resources are related, a report that integrates all of them would facilitate analysis. In this research, the relationship between innovation and CSR is studied. Environmental commitment may be a source of innovation (in the process of production and types of products) and involves social, relational, and intellectual capital changes. Innovation has previously been analysed from a perspective of competitiveness, necessitating a change of approach towards stakeholders that could allow us to reach a conceptual understanding of these relations. The research is empirically verified by studying a sample of 590 firm-years across 118 European companies that are leaders in sustainability, in the five-year period of 2011–2015. The results obtained show that CSR is a benchmark for addressing innovation and justifies the interest in an integrated reporting model that provides a global view of business.