Background

The unprecedented aspirations of seven billion people, ever-increasing stress on earth’s finite resources, self-reinforcing socioeconomic disparity, and rising demands for institutional transparency and governance have unavoidable implications for the enterprises of tomorrow.  Even in the established corporations, what is today seen as stakeholder obligation or as mere legal compliance requirements of sustainability, CSR, and corporate governance could well be the core differentiator and value proposition of tomorrow’s enterprises.  It can therefore be argued that, if one can lay a foundation that could enhance standards of transparency, ethics, and values in enterprises, one could expect the future enterprises to be more sustainable and capable of addressing social, economic and environmental challenges while bringing equitable opportunities and prosperity to a much larger section of the society. 

With this in the backdrop, the Wadhwani Centre for Entrepreneurship Development (WCED) at ISB is embarking on a journey to facilitate the development and growth of responsible enterprises of tomorrow with a focus on:

• Developing principle-based frameworks supported by research and case studies, etc, for responsible entrepreneurship (in the specific areas of ethics and self-governance practices and responsible values) associated with enterprise creation and growth
• New metrics for facilitating a better understanding of responsible entrepreneurial practices
• Promoting and harnessing entrepreneurial approaches to address developmental constraints
• Building true trusteeship in enterprises, value-based leadership and shared value co-creation
• Facilitating articulation of appropriate policies ,for example, new forms of institutions and the associated new rules of the game, new meaning of competition, policies etc.
• And others as identified by the core group