Mission Statement of the Institute for Corporate Responsibility (ICR)

ICR Research Grants Application Form

The aim of ICR is to be the world's leading intellectual center for scholarship in the field of corporate responsibility and to be recognizd as such.

The Institute for Corporate Responsibility officially received its Charter from George Washington University in October, 2006. Its Executive Director is Timothy Fort, the Lindner-Gambal Professor of Business Ethics. He is assisted by Mark Starik in his role as Director of the Institute. There are six reasons why the creation of this Institute is particularly timely.

First, the George Washington University School of Business (“GWSB”) has already carved out a leadership position in the field of corporate responsibility as designated repeatedly by the Beyond Grey Pinstripes rankings of Universities in the field. The most recent such ranking placed GWSB third in the United States behind only Stanford and Notre Dame and ahead of Michigan, Virginia, Wharton, Northwestern, and Harvard. Second, in 2006, the GWSB and the ICR became the administrative home of the professional society International Association for Business and Society (IABS). Third, the reputation of GWSB has been further solidified by the filling of the Lindner-Gambal Professorship of Business Ethics, himself the 2003 Beyond Grey Pinstripes Winner for Academic Leadership when he was a professor at the University of Michigan. Fourth, there are numerous, currently disparate projects conducted on the GW campus on corporate responsibility ranging from the Law School to Philosophy to the Elliot School to the School of Public Policy and Public Administration and others that ICR is able to integrate. Fifth, from an external standpoint, there has rarely, perhaps ever, been a time when issues of business responsibility have been so scrutinized and analyzed by government, the NGO community, academic institutions, and others and so there is a market need for the scholarship and programs ICR is positioned to produce. Sixth, there is no other Institute of Corporate Responsibility with the contemplated breadth and depth of coverage of corporate responsibility issues in the world thus providing a unique opportunity for GW to be the leader in this field and to be recognized as such.

The Institute has four primary program areas:

• Peace through Commerce
• Environmental Sustainability
• Corporate Governance
• Global Stakeholder Strategies.

Each program may focus solely on research or on teaching (including continuing education) or it may engage in both. Externally focused programs, such as conferences and speakers, would be included as having dimensions of both research and teaching. The University as a whole, and its new CIBER program in particular, offer a rich set of potential resources for collaboration in this regard.

The intention of the founders of the Institute is that these programs are not rigidly bounded nor will they be static. It may well be that one of the program areas focuses more on the development of research, for instance, on social issues while a second program, also focused on social issues, may then take a turn toward Executive Education or conferences.