What is responsible business? Why it is important, and how it affects companies? Are there more bad than good consequences of being responsible? I read a book written by Maria Joutsenvirta, Jukka Mäkinen, Mikko Jalas and Minna Halme. They all are University professors and have shared their professional knowledge for this book. The book was quite interesting for me because we will start doing business soon with our team company, and these responsible and sustainable things are nowadays important.

Being responsible aims to improve nature’s conditions and social well-being around the world.  When a company is responsible and sustainable it can affect the company’s competitiveness and profitability. This is the thing many entrepreneurs are scared of. Those things are playing a big role because harness to profitability can block ideas and changes towards responsible and sustainable business. This has been a discussion for a long time: does it really affect your competitiveness and profitability, or it is just a way of thinking?  There are many researches about this, but getting the answer is impossible to find because everyone has different opinions and thoughts about it. Is being responsible for companies win-win or trade-off situation?  Usually, entrepreneurs plead on financial difficulties when thinking about changing more responsible models.

Responsibility can bring many positive impacts that many haven’t even thought of before. It can improve resource management and efficiency in a company. This can make big difference in expenses and costs. It can improve the company’s interest group, and gives chance to do differentiation to the products, which can increase the prices and sales. Being responsible can also open doors to new markets. For example, you can offer your products or services to areas where there are strict responsible codes, or the main supplier has ethical requirements. When working with responsibility and sustainability, can open new business opportunities. For example, start selling the responsible business knowledge to other companies and organizations. This can also start new innovations.

There are also negative impacts and the reasons why every company or organization is not responsible already. As been said already it can affect competitiveness and profitability, but there are still other factors. When manufacturing products with responsible methods can increase the costs. You may need to use more expensive raw material, buy more expensive machines or employ more workers. This can decrease productivity. This one comes to contradiction with the responsible way because it can also increase productivity not only decrease. It seems to depend on how carefully everything is organized and done. Responsible can as well influence the picture of a company’s product, how it looks and is it as efficient as before. ——–> Quality can decline, and attractiveness decrease because of the material.

There is a possibility to make responsible changes by the law, but the impacts are both positive and negative. For example, by law is possible to stop companies using some chemical that is non-environment friendly and which causes a lot of emissions. This decision can end the entire business if the chemical is reliant on the company. Government can also add new sustainable taxes, that companies must pay more for using those materials that are not eco-friendly. The positive outcomes would be to have a healthier environment and social well-being. This topic has been on the government’s table for a long time but making the changes or new results isn’t easy.

In the end, the responsibility comes from the entrepreneurs and decision-makers themselves. They must start making the changes towards sustainable businesses. There is a possibility to make environment-friendly choices in many different industries. Everything must start from somewhere, it can be a really small thing or change, but step by step you can be more responsible. At some point, the world may go to the point that it cannot endure emissions or afford nonrenewable natural resources anymore. That’s why the topic is serious, and companies and consumers should think about these things again.