August 8, 2002 | Read Time: 1 minute
Digital Corporate Citizenship: the Business Response to the Digital Divide
by Craig Warren Smith
This book focuses on philanthropy projects carried out between 1997 and 2001 by 60 of the largest high-tech corporations: why the projects were started, how they are managed, and how they affect corporate strategy. Craig Warren Smith, a fellow at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says his book is less about corporate citizenship than about “hard-nosed business strategy.” Long-term goals of such corporate philanthropic projects, according to Mr. Smith, include reaching out to underserved people who may become future consumers, and winning over skeptical govenment bureaucrats in places like China and Brazil where the digital economy is just beginning to take off.
These projects, most of which have been sustained even after the dot-com crash, include Oracle’s $50-million in-kind gift program, which put networked computers into schools, and IBM’s Reinventing Education program, created in 1997, which gave school districts $1-million in technology grants.
Mr. Smith discusses the creation of various projects, the marriage between corporate foundations and their marketing departments, and the management of alliances between high-tech companies and nonprofit groups. He concludes that many of the companies have leveraged their technology and management systems to create sizable projects at minimal out-of-pocket costs, and that they have more extensive and broadly distributed relationships with nonprofit organizations than do “old economy” companies.
Publisher: Center on Philanthropy at Indiana U., 550 West North Street, Suite 301, Indianapolis, Ind. 46202-3272; (317) 274-4200; fax (317) 684-8900; kkeirouz@iupui.edu; http://www.philanthropy.iupui.edu; 134 pages; $24.95; I.S.B.N. 1-884354-20-3.
