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Corporate Social Responsibility of Energy Companies: International Experience and Polycriterial Evaluation of Technological Innovations’ Effectiveness
The fuel and energy complex is a system-forming element of the modern economy, determining both the opportunities for economic growth and the prospects for sustainable development (Cui et al., 2022; Li et al., 2022; Padmanabhan et al., 2022; Wen and Jia, 2022). This strategic role of energy companies covers two types of activities. First, the implementation of initiatives in the field of corporate social responsibility aimed at increasing the sustainability (universal accessibility and environmental safety/purity) of energy (Ahmed et al., 2022; Ates, 2022; Madaleno et al., 2022; Shukla and Geetika, 2022; Wang and Sun, 2022).
Second, the introduction of technological innovations that allow optimizing the business processes of energy companies. In the existing literature, authors such as Brizhak and Tolstobokov (2022), Dudukalov et al. (2021), Guo et al. (2022), Popkova et al. (2022), Qu et al. (2022), Shi et al. (2022), and Vanchukhina et al. (2016) consider technological innovations as a promising tool for corporate social responsibility of energy companies, as they have the potential to increase productivity and environmental safety of their activities. However, the extent to which this potential can be used in practice is insufficiently studied and unclear. This is a research gap that is being filled in this article.
This article is intended to demonstrate the contradictory impact of technological innovations on the corporate social responsibility of energy companies. The originality of the study lies in the fact that it goes beyond the usual framework of modernization of energy companies, taking into account the impact of the digital economy on their corporate social responsibility. The traditional focus on internal factors forms the idea of corporate social responsibility as a manifestation of the altruism of energy companies.
The article presents a new view on the corporate social responsibility of energy companies since it is heavily influenced by market pressure. In this vein, the article is aimed at studying international experience and conducting a polycriterial evaluation of the effectiveness of technological innovations of energy companies from the standpoint of corporate social responsibility.
The contribution of the article to the improvement of scientific knowledge consists in the development of a new scientific-methodological approach to assessing the compliance of energy companies with EnergyTech criteria. The novelty, peculiarity, and advantage of the new approach are that it involves determining the compliance of EnergyTech energy companies from the perspective of efficiency rather than from the perspective of costs (digital competitiveness)—for the first time, it takes into account the contribution of these costs to results—energy intensity level of primary energy, investment in energy with private participation, and renewable electricity output.