Social and economic incentives are seen for businesses that invest in green technology.
Businesses main goals are to please shareholders and make profits. However, corporate social responsibility, or CSR, has become a new business philosophy that supplements the goals of business. CSR dictates that the economic output of a business needs to be parallel to the concerns of society. The best example of this is green technology. A CSR perspective would state that a business has more incentives to change its emission standards for the greater good and for their profits.
Debating Perspectives
A business will often employ CSR perspectives because that is the business' nature. However, CSR is a movement toward businesses being actively responsible for the impact they have on the environment, society or institutions. You will often see businesses, nowadays, promoting the fact they are actively part of this movement.
Incentives
One might wonder how economic output is benefited from such investments. For example, it is a fair point that certain investments toward greener technologies might set back a business in profits. However, the CSR movement usually promotes ideas such as tax or credit incentives for businesses that do invest in CSR ideas.
Cost
There is also a cost argument to many CSR perspectives. If environmental sustainability will make capital investments cost more in the future, than a business may have more of an advantage investing in a CSR policy now than later. Also, when a business actively promotes itself as a CSR business, profits may rise from socially-conscious investors and consumers.
Going Beyond
Often the best CSR success stories are from business who do two things at once. One, the CSR business actively goes beyond legal regulations, such as environmental or worker laws, and sets higher standards. This serves as a public relations strategy showing that the business is ahead of the government curve. Another successful strategy is to be vocal on a political issue. Although some businesses would like to be apolitical, consumers and investors may like the vocal political standing your business makes on a certain issue, even if the issue has no impact on economic output.
