To talk what I hope is commonsense about Corporate Responsibility – what is it, how has it developed, why is it so important to business and to the world?To explore what it means for business and especially for the practice of managementTo explain what I hope the new Doughty Centre, as an integral part of the Cranfield School of Management, can do to help improve the practice of responsible management profitably.

Date :  April 2006A set of global best-practices for responsible investment.

Date: May 2004There has been a general consensus that socially responsible investing (SRI) leads to inferior, rather than superior, performance. Using Innovest’s corporate ecoefficiency scores, the authors of this report provided evidence to the contrary. They composed two equity portfolios of different "eco-efficiency" ratings and found that over the period 1995-2003 the high-ranked portfolio gave substantially higher average returns than the low-ranked one. They showed that this difference could not be explained by differences in market sensitivity, investment style, or several other factors, and so concluded that the incremental benefits of SRI can be "substantial".

In 2004 Tomorrow's company published a report on what robust  and responsible financial services would look like after comprehensive research and consultation with hundreds of proffessionals working in the city. Restoring Trust has been validated by the financial crisis of 2008 and is still a useful document to provide clear goals.  In many ways, the challenges facing today's policy makers is to get to the system which Restoring Trust sets out.

This presentation was given by Dr. Matthew Kiernan, Chief Executive, Innovest Strategic Value Advisor at the 2008 Tomorrow's Company Annual lecture. In it he powerfully brought together the arguments for the importance of recognising the link between the management of environmental, social and governance factors as an indicator of business performance, sustainable value creation and long-term investment returns. You can read Tony Manwaring's blog about the event here.