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Sustainability and Social Innovation

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Part of the book series: CSR, Sustainability, Ethics & Governance ((CSEG))

Abstract

Since the publication of Our Common Future by the World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987 and Elkington’s (1997) Cannibals with Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of Twenty-First Century Business 10 years later, it is widely accepted that sustainability has three dimensions: an economic, an environmental, and a social one. Out of these three dimensions or pillars, as they are sometimes known, the social one has received the least interest, also when it comes to reporting (Fifka and Drabble 2012). While the economic dimension seems to be the overriding pillar, the ecological one has also been given considerable attention, especially with regard to the development of new environmentally friendly technologies. Thus, in this regard, a mutual interdependency between sustainability and its ecological dimension can be observed. On the one hand side, ecology can be regarded as one vital element of sustainability. Out of these three dimensions or pillars, as they are sometimes known, the social one has received the least interest, also when it comes to reporting (Fifka and Drabble 2012).

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Correspondence to Matthias S. Fifka .

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© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Fifka, M.S., Idowu, S.O. (2013). Sustainability and Social Innovation. In: Osburg, T., Schmidpeter, R. (eds) Social Innovation. CSR, Sustainability, Ethics & Governance. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36540-9_28

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