Innovation through CSR

The importance of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is enhanced when it comes to hypercompetitive markets. In nowadays hypercompetitive markets, companies are finding difficult to survive and engage in practice of Corporate Social Responsibility. Some companies try to "do good" and also "do well", which means that while their commitment to society development is high, their sales are going up.
In past, companies focused solely on financial performance, but now their interest and commitment into CSR has increased dramatically. What happens is that interest and commitment of those companies is highly rewarded by their customers by being loyal and decreasing their price-consciousness. As a result, companies’ customer base enlarges and sales profits go up. That can be regarded as one reason companies might be interested in pursuing the concept of CSR. Another reason might be the pressure from company stakeholders such as customers, local NGOs, and government. For example, governments might introduce laws or rules prohibiting certain practices to promote safer environments, etc.
What is more challenging and interesting, companies can gain competitive advantage by practicing CSR concept or simply by being "shaper of society". Such companies are 100% committed to promoting social welfare and by doing so further increase competition in the market. Usually, entrance to the market is blocked since new entrants do not possess such amount of resources to compete with mature organization with highly developed social programs. Here comes the most interesting question as "is innovation hindered in such mature organizations with CSR or adversely, it is encouraged?"
From my point of view, such large organizations engage in innovation and creativity through launching new programs, new products and combination of both by integrating Corporate Social Responsibility into their day-to-day activities. Employees are more encouraged to think about innovative "bundle of products and benefits" company can offer to its customers in a way that it reflects company’s commitment to social benefits. Most importantly, employees of organization promoting CSR are the part of that larger society that is served by their organization. Consequently, employees are much more motivated to be creative and innovative.