Corporate Social Responsibility in Building a Competitive Advantage in the Age of Industry 4.0

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Experience and the involvement of co-creation partners in utilizing and developing CSR tools and exercising similar behaviors in business partners currently represents the indicator of the quality of their joint efforts. Information on a permanent lack in at least one of the partners should act as a warning of the potential issues, conflicts, and even pathologies. Therefore, partners in co-creation should be increasingly required to produce reports on their CSR, or other tools identifying their “power of CSR”. In the age of Industry 4.0, when the level of requirements and the pace of accompanying changes, both technological and social, generate and discover new possibilities, often of quick, spectacular profit, it is easy to fall victim to the paradoxical mindset pitfall, which is oriented to short-term, risky, often unethical and sociallySustainability 2019, 11, 4954 19 of 38 irresponsible solutions. In order not to lose customers and profit, and reputation and social trust, which takes years of hard work to develop, it is worth considering the paradoxes that are key to co-creation and approaching their solutions in a conscious way, which can be fostered by reading this paper (see Appendix B—Table A2). The conducted analyses showed that the research of the above problems is generally quite universal and well known. However, the fact that they are usually conducted without mutual coincidence taken into account should be noted, i.e., the importance of CSR is investigated separately (i.e., [54,55,60,62,137,169]), the problems of cooperation and networking separately (i.e., [13,15,16,18]), aspects of co-creation separately (i.e., [13,27,28,47,137]), paradoxes and/or pathologies separately (i.e., [35,37,39,73,112]), or separately the problems of the importance, requirements, positive sides and threats of Industry 4.0 (i.e., [9,63,89,91,183]. Therefore, the base, developed for the needs of this article, aggregating “the paradoxes and areas of potential pathologies of co-creation in the age of Industry 4.0”, may be considered a certain novelty, contributing to management studies. When analyzing the individual cases, some common patterns were also observed. It seems that the described pathological cases of co-creation are driven in principle by greed, vanity and herd mentality, understood as “jumping on a bandwagon” of the idea (here, possibilities of IT/ICT, new technologies in the age of Industry 4.0, the uniqueness of the solution, a possibility of a quick, easy profit). Based on the above observations, it is worth recommending that when becoming involved in co-creation, one should observe ethical standards and assumptions of CSR, and require that from the partners and other parties involved. Otherwise, instead of co-creation, the result achieved will be exactly the opposite to that intended, which is co-destruction and condemnation instead of glory.

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