IBIS - Impulse Centre on Business in Society

Mission

Corporations are today facing waves of global changes opening up new dimensions of risk, challenges but also opportunities for business. They are facing globalization, calls for more sustainable forms of development, as well as corporate scandals, conflicts of cultures, religions and ideologies. They provoke the need for business to acknowledge and take account of environmental, social and ethical issues and increasingly demand managerial sensitivity and awareness to a wide range of societal concerns and settings.

IBiS’s core purpose is to produce and generate scientific and business research but also directly contribute to the learning environment of students and businesses on the aspects of business and society. The aim is to contribute to the development of knowledge on new forms of management and governance, which are a prerequisite for tackling issues related to business in society, sustainability, corporate social responsibility, or business ethics.

Scope

Sustainable enterprises pay attention to their own continuation and profitability, linked to their interaction with the broader field of direct and indirect stakeholders, like the Government, natural resources, future generations, interest groups, etc. They are convinced that high quality relations with the stakeholders are important performance drivers. Optimising stakeholder value is one of their primary objectives, and to realise this, they are not only focused towards their stockholders, but also towards the direct (clients, suppliers, employees) and indirect stakeholders. In this respect, they are managing the so-called 'triple bottom line' of entrepreneurship, namely economics, ecology and socio-ethics and they know that each dimension can be linked with the other one(s).

Objectives

The main activities of the Corporate Sustainability Impulse Centre are applied research, organisation of roundtables, experience exchange, servicing and coaching of the partners in the implementation of the concepts, networking, paper writing, and organising seminars. The Corporate Sustainability Impulse Centre has in fact evolved from the former Impulse Centre for Environmental Management, knowing that in order to achieve sustainability, attention should also be placed on the economic and social matters. The main focus of this centre is on the integrative level. In this respect, its main objective is to develop concepts, instruments and performance measures to facilitate and measure the integrated steering on the triple bottom line.

Important topics of discussion are:

• stakeholder and shareholder value;
• corporate social responsibility and corporate citizenship;
• integrated risk management;
• social auditing;
• performance measurement and reporting;
• eco-efficiency;
• environmental management systems, socially responsible investment.