A Company Serving the Common Good: Schneider Electric’s Story

In our September/October issue, we began a series of articles on the contributions made by companies to the common good. We continue that series in this issue with the stories of some of the actors at the centre of these activities. After the experience of “Initiative France”, presented in the foregoing article by Jean-Pierre Worms, it is the turn of Gilles Vermot-Desroches to lay out what Schneider Electric has done in terms of sponsorship and developing its social responsibility in the broader sense. Launched in 1998, as CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) was beginning to become an established norm, the Schneider Electric Foundation provided a logical continuation and expansion of the initiatives taken by the company within its sector across the world, bringing the greatest possible number of stakeholders together. Twenty years later, we can see here how a company can, concretely and at its own particular level, participate in promoting the common good, and extend its activity as new societal challenges emerge.