Firms are increasingly expected to provide their capacity for action and their innovation capabilities to face current social, environmental and economic “grand challenges”. However, responsible governance frameworks still have to be designed to ensure that firms protect their innovation capabilities and use them in a responsible way. Several papers have set some grounds for such a framework: because innovators have a tendency to escape existing regulations, responsible governance cannot rely solely on traditional regulatory mechanisms (legal sanction, reporting obligation, …). They should rely on deliberative, reflexive and participative governance. These deliberative devices, however, provide limited control and accountability, which in turn might discredit the whole governance framework. These devices also raise the question of the firms’ responsibilities towards still unknown future impacts of their activities. New legal tools are therefore regularly experimented. Recently, Profit-with-Purpose corporate forms such as the Benefit Corporation in the US have been introduced in the corporate law of several countries with the hope to provide a legal device to promote companies’ social behaviours. However, to what extent these new legal forms can contribute to responsible innovation is still unclear. This paper aims at exploring new governance devices based on a profit-with-purpose corporate form to deal with the challenges of responsible innovation. It is grounded in a longitudinal case study of a French company which has experimented innovative governance mechanisms. We show that Profit-with-Purpose forms provide a useful framework for responsible innovation if certain specific innovations are added to existing requirements: the formulation of the purpose in the form of a “commitment in the unknown”, which aim at protecting the innovation capabilities of the firm and at eliciting a desirable future to which the company engages its development; and the creation of a governance committee dedicated not only to evaluate this purpose but also to assess the quality of the firm’s exploration of various innovative strategies to face its future responsibilities. We finally discuss some implications for managers and policy-makers.
Profit-with-purpose corporations (PPCs) are new corporate forms that include a commitment of social or environmental nature in their by-laws. Because of its binding nature, we expect that a purpose introduces some stability and may freeze an identity or some institutional logics within PPCs. But what happens when the purpose is formulated as a challenge or as an innovative goal? To what extent does it create a new identity, or new institutional dynamics? Methodologically, as the new legal framework is too recent in Europe to allow empirical analysis, the study is based on an empirical case of PPC: La Poste, an incumbent company of public service in France. We have studied the way the mission has been historically defined in this company, and regularly revised contractually. We have also identified conception patterns used by the department in charge of exploring new societal commitments of the company. Our work reveals important phenomena with strong implications: the case shows that a purpose-driven corporation may need to continuously reformulate its purpose and to revise its identity accordingly. It also indicates that a generative purpose leads to a systematic effort to designate new concepts that precisely call for the construction of new institutional logics. Far from institutionalizing specific logics or an identity, the purpose appears as a lever for renewing the organizational identity as well as the institutional logics present within the company.
