The purpose of this article is to define a logical process through which social needs can be investigated and integrated into corporate strategy, thus allowing management to meet the expectations of its stakeholder.
The process has been defined on the basis of a review of international literature that helped to identify the main problems related to the recognition of social expectations by the company and the implications of these expectations on the overall competitive strategy.
The research has lead to the construction of a framework to address social needs: the social‐competitive innovation pyramid. It is shaped in order to help companies to understand their degrees of efficiency in responding to their partners' expectations. The pyramid identifies five efficiency levels. The highest one, named “social competitive synthesis”, shows the best response to stakeholders' needs; the lowest level, “temporary sacrifice of social expectations”, is the one where social expectations are sacrificed in the view of the companies strategy.
The paper presents corporate responsibility as an integral part of corporate strategy, so much so that it helps corporate management to find innovative solutions to fulfil stakeholder expectations. Therefore, corporate responsibility becomes a creative factor in developing competitiveness.
