Knowledge Management for CSR and Sustainability Performance: Renewing the Business Model Through Systematic Innovation for Value Creation

Disclosures on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) demonstrating accountability of business organizations to their communities and more recently on Sustainability have become necessary as requested by various stakeholders and regulatory bodies around the world. Social, environmental and economic sustainability of organizations is an area that various stakeholders continue to quest for more information about achieving performance without sacrificing long-termer benefits of the communities. However, CSR and Sustainability may not be effective under a business system that focuses on near-term performance as restrained by conventional financial controls. As a consequence, CSR and Sustainability performance could be merely mediocre and public relations-driven without a systematic effort that optimizes the use of knowledge. Stakeholders' concerns about CSR and Sustainability of organizations bring about the need to develop a complementary culture and internal routines to enhance such practice. Prior studies have in fact revealed a positive influence of CSR and Sustainability over business performance of an organization in a longer run. Knowledge management (KM) is regarded as a systematic approach to manage knowledge effectively to create value for an organization. Our contention is that KM adopting a systematic approach enables organizations to make use of both tacit and articulated knowledge for continuous improvement of organizational performance with renewal of business model. This paper aims to provide an interdisciplinary literature review pertinent to the theoretical foundations of KM and to examine how they could be relevant to the development of CSR and Sustainability. A framework is explored in this paper to construct an integrated performance management and measurement system that facilitates innovation initiatives for CSR and Sustainability. Complementing the development of a supportive corporate culture, it points out the importance of KM in enhancing the ability of an organization to embed internal continuous processes for improvement of economic, social and environmental sustainability. It proposes a range of potential studies to deepen the understanding of KM for CSR and Sustainability as the engine for renewing business model for organizations of the future.