Does safety-oriented corporate social responsibility promote innovation in the Thai trucking industry?

Modern-day firms need to become more innovative while complying strictly with increasingly complex legal and regulatory requirements and fulfilling their corporate social responsibility (CSR) for multiple stakeholders. How to turn legal, regulatory, and voluntary requirements into business opportunities is a new managerial challenge for firms. This study investigates the relationship between safety-oriented CSR and innovation, using the case of Thai trucking industry. To empirically examine the relationship between CSR and innovation, this study performs a path analysis and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). The empirical results support the association between CSR and innovation. However, skilled employees are key elements for firms to stimulate innovation with CSR activities. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.