How Responsible Digitalization Creates Profitable Pathways to Sustainability

This paper explores how companies that commit to Corporate Digital Responsibility (CDR) overcome first trust and then cost barriers to successfully implement digitally enabled sustainability strategies. A CDR culture, triggered by the European Unions’ General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), builds trust, which yields motivation and collaboration amongst stakeholders necessary for digital operations strategy deployment. Based on a unique cross-industry sample of small and large companies from a first-of-its-kind competition on corporate digital responsibility, we identify four resulting pathways to digitally enabled sustainability. Being lean & green aims at higher process efficiency, customer centricity & engagement focuses on a better fit to customer needs, value chain integration leverages synergies with channel partners, and ecosystem creation reduces market entry barriers to sustainable innovations. In four case studies, we describe best-practice examples for each of these approaches and derive insights about exemplary operations strategy deployment processes for sustainability