Stakeholder Engagement in Sustainability Innovation: Experiences in the Jewellery Business

The chapter aims to study engagement as the basis for innovative projects that respond to an objective of social and environmental sustainability and describes the multi-stakeholder committee as the ideal container for realizing such engagement. The chapter explores the experience of the Ethics Committee of Coloured Gemstones, by Assogemme, in Italy. The goal of the Committee is to define “a procedural code concerning the production and marketing of the coloured gemstones in accordance with the principles of ethical conduct”. The stakeholder engagement approach and the founding of a multi-stakeholder committee for the creation of ethical guidelines are widespread in the jewellery business, which presents many ethical problems: child labour, environmental havoc and social inequality. But the case analysed is the first experience in the coloured gemstone jewellery industry, which is characterized by a plurality of ethical aspects related to the variety of these gemstones. The study of this Committee, which is engaged in the challenge to create a sustainable innovation process, a managerial system for the traceability of jewellery products made with coloured gemstones, underlines opportunities and problems of the stakeholder engagement approach.