On Friday, 21 November 2014, a conference on corporate responsibility was held at Fulda University of Applied Sciences under the direction of Prof. Dr Bettina Stoll (Faculty SW), Prof. Dr Christian Schrader (Faculty SK) and Prof. Dr Stefanie Deinert (Faculty W) and with the support of the CeSST research centre. Not only the recently adopted EU directive on CSR reporting obligations, but also the course of studies "Business Law - Sustainability & Ethics", which started in the winter semester and for which the conference was a content-related kick-off event, provided the occasion for a conference on this topic.

Exactly six days before the conference, the new "CSR Directive" was published in the Official Journal of the European Union. It obliges companies in future to include non-financial aspects in their management report. The EU member states now have two years to transpose the directive into national law. In addition to the directly obligated large companies, SMEs - for example in the supply chain - may also be affected by the reporting obligation. The directive lists various frameworks (e.g. GRI, ISO 26000, EMAS) to which companies can orient themselves in their reporting. It remains to be seen what the Member States will do in detail.

The fact that the conference could not have been better placed - in terms of timing and the explosive nature of the topic - was shown, among other things, by the impressive response. Around 180 participants followed the exciting presentations on the topic from a legal perspective (Prof. Dr. Eckard Rehbinder, University of Frankfurt) as well as from the perspective of a company (Dr. Johannes Merck- Director Corporate Responsibility of the Otto Group) and engaged in lively discussions.

Representatives of regionally based companies of various sizes (Tegut, Bionade, Papperts, MuP) gave vivid accounts of what they understand by corporate responsibility and how they implement it in a variety of ways. In an interesting final round, representatives from politics and business as well as NGOs (BMJV, BDI, AÖL, Germanwatch, CorA-Network for Corporate Responsibility, CSR-Europe) discussed the potential, challenges, consequences and implementation of the directive.