Corporate social innovations are designed to benefit firms and society. Much like any innovation, corporate social innovations can backfire and quickly draw negative attention. In this article, we consider the conditions that lead to impactful corporate social innovations, and we develop an approach to creating high impact corporate social innovations. Using the context of sustainability and waste, we demonstrate the need for a broad scope in considering the influence of a corporate social innovation, the importance of metrics and monitoring for gauging impact and the need for piloting corporate social innovations before full-scale adoption. We assert that consideration of scope, metrics, monitoring and piloting will lead to more influential corporate social innovations.
