Development: Strategic Tool for Competitiveness

Abstract: A multinational firm can decide to adopt sustainable development strategies in order to respond to stakeholders ’ pressures, to gain a competitive advantage, or to satisfy its ethical concerns. In order to adopt these strategies under competitive, environmental, and social pressures, investing in SDI could be an adequate strategy to be used by these companies. Managing SDI is extremely important for a multinational firm since it can cause its success and its failure. In addition, such management could be extremely difficult and risky. In fact, there is a risk that employees do not understand the benefit of implementing SDI projects, which could result in resistance from them and consequently to considerable complications inside the multinational. In the previous research about SDI, many researchers studied the impact of the stakeholders on SDI. Other researchers were interested in the marketing aspects of SDI. The goal of this paper is to help understand how to implement a SDI in a multinational firm. We demonstrate that in order to successfully implement SDI, multinationals should promote information sharing between employees, decentralize decision making, encourage continual interaction with corporate marketing, and evangelize the importance of sustainable development policy