CSR Practices and SME Innovativeness in Greece

The main objective of this chapter is to explore how the adoption of corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices is associated with firm innovativeness, utilising a rich data survey of 3,500 Greek SMEs. Furthermore, by classifying SMEs into two groups, the high-performing and low-performing in terms of CSR, we explore whether and in which way the application of CSR moderates the relationship between innovation inputs (such as R&D expenditure and R&D collaboration) and innovation output. The findings obtained from the first stage of our analysis suggest that CSR practices drive the innovation process as well as the innovation output of SMEs, supporting thus SDG9. The empirical results obtained from the second stage of analysis indicate that the wide adoption of CSR practices may stand as an alternative way to established and more expensive drivers of innovation output in adverse times when firms lack financial resources especially in crisis-hit economies such as the case of Greece.