Accepted paper in 2009 Academy of Management

A recent paper co-authored by Associate Professor Kai Hockerts, cbsCSR, and Associate Professor Rolf Wüstenhagen, University of St. Gallen's Institute for Economy and the Environment, has just been accepted into this year's Academy of Management. The 2009 Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, themed "Green Management Matters", will take place in August in Chicago.

The paper is entitled "Greening Goliaths versus Emerging Davids – How Incumbents and New Entrants Drive Sustainable Entrepreneurship" and proposes a model of how incumbents and new entrants engage differently into sustainable entrepreneurship.

The paper argues that firms have two distinct possibilities to react to the challenge of improving their environmental and social performance: sustainability bureaucracy (i.e. the optimization of existing business models through the use of sustainability management systems, termed the "Greening Goliaths") and sustainability entrepreneurship (i.e. the creation of new business models through the identification and exploitation of opportunities to improve social and environmental conditions, termed "Emerging Davids"). The paper analyses the interplay between the ‘Greening Goliaths’ and ‘Emerging Davids’ and shows how it is their compounded impact that promotes the sustainable transformation of industries.

For more information on the paper, please contact Associate Professor Kai Hockerts, kho.ikl@cbs.dk.