Is accountability an important corporate value? If so, how does it relate to sustainability? Give relevant real-life examples.

Note:

- answer should be in 750 words

- please write a new answer, not a copy from another question

Thank you in advance

Chapter 7 Evaluating enterprise and innovation solutions Chapter 7 Evaluating enterprise and innovation solutions 7.1 Introduction This chapter deals with three topics: accountability, sustainable business models and resilience. All three topics are highly specialised and a full review is beyond the scope of this single chapter. The goal is to provide the reader with an overview of the main importance of accountability and resilience for new and existing small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) where the managers or owners aspire to be innovative and sustainable. Taken together, the previous chapters have explored the view that 'sustainability is about being innovative and cost-effective in creating, managing and sustaining an enterprise over different stages of its evolution. This includes the way the organisation is structured and operated to uncover and address opportunities, challenges and risks for the enterprise, the setting of strategic objectives and priorities and how these are implemented and evaluated across functional areas of production, marketing and finance over time to produce desired outcomes. To survive and achieve sustainability in a fast growing and changing environment, organisations need well thought out strategies (Christensen et al., 1998), including identifying and building of new business models or upgrading existing ones (Christensen and Raynor, 2003; Christensen et al., 2002). This chapter explains the role of accountability and resilience in this process. 7.2 Accountability The topic of governance was explored in Chapter 2 in terms of ownership and management of sustainable enterprises. In this and other chapters, it has been noted that innovative firms strive to eliminate numbers from evaluation systems by creating a working environment were employees can have fun and be creative rather than trying to achieve ambitious performance targets and outcomes. However, numbers, statistics and other indicators are important measures of performance outcomes and every organisation attaches a lot of significance to performance measurement. This section explores why performance indicators and the reporting of outcomes are significant by focusing on the concept of accountability as applied to sustainable enterprises. Accountability is a term that is used in all walks of life - at national and local government level, non-governmental organisations (not-for-profit) and private commercial (or for-profit) organisations. The focus here is on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which are at the core of the cases discussed in this Reader. The following quote from the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) summarises vividly why accountability is important to the governance of SMEs: 113 stainable Enterprise and Innovation III