Good Business: Small Firms and Responsible Entrepreneurship

This brings together two of my main areas of interest: small businesses and the idea of responsible business - what many people call "Corporate Social Responsibility" (CSR).

I have been chairing the UK Small Business Consortium since it began in 2002. The Consortium brings together the major organisations representing small firms in the UK like the British Chambers of Commerce, the Institute of Directors and the Federation of Small Businesses; together with organisations championing Responsible Business like Accountability and Arts & Business and CSR Europe. The Consortium is not a separate body but a pooling of passion and expertise and routes to market. Together, we have developed www.smallbusinessjourney.com to help small firms improve their performance and profitability through adopting environmental, social and community responsibility. We also want to develop a training module for small business advisers. We have just published a new guide to help small firms integrate sustainability and responsible practice in their business: Better Business Journey.

I have also acted as a rapporteur for the European Union's Multi-stakeholder Forum on CSR and small firms; moderated a week-long, on-line discussion about responsible entrepreneurship, for the Dutch EU Presidency; and been on the advisory committee for the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) work on small firms and sustainability measuring & reporting which produced the "High 5 Guide to CSR reporting for small firms."(Although personally, I don't think that producing reports will be a high priority for many small firms - although they may need to be able to report on their performance and impacts to big business customers.

As well as trying to promote www.smallbusinessjourney.com, I am also now adapting our Seven Step Model to integrate Responsible Business practice into a company, to make it appropriate for small firms. Additionally, I have been advising EABIS - the European Academy for Business in Society, on the development of its workstream on both research in and education on smes and CSR.

In terms of the evolution of my thinking on Corporate Social Responsibility and Small Firms (although I never use the CSR term with owner-managers themselves!) and about how to engage small firms, the evolution would be:

- 2002 Report of original Consortium for the DTI

- 2003 Think-Piece for The Copenhagen Centre - below

- 2004 Report of the EU Multi-stakeholder Forum - below

- 2005 Think-Piece for the Small Business Consortium

- 2005 The Accountable Corporation Chapter

- 2005 Speech opening the EABIS Conference on a Research Agenda for Small Businesses and CSR - Durham - below

- Small is Sustainable (and beautiful too) - encouraging European smaller enterprises to be sustainable - co-authored with Tom Dodd for the Doughty Centre (2008)

- as a quick reprise of what sustainability means for small businesses, I participated in a webcast for BT's Small Business Week in October 2008