Linden’s CSR Culture
Lindens culture roots in the idea of creating value for its shareholders, investees AND the broader context.
The very idea of Linden Ventures originated from a perceived lack of entrepreneurship activity in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Linden’s founders find that the best way to address this is through being entrepreneurs themselves and, with more leverage, supporting and promoting other entrepreneurs. Our vehicle to leverage our knowledge and contacts is Linden Ventures, which provides operative support, knowledge, contacts and capital. For us, this idea alone holds, next to an obvious economic component, a strong social and broader societal motivation. Entrepreneurship activity creates jobs, fuels economic growth, can alleviate environmental and social problems and helps people to fulfil their personal aspirations.
All our decisions and activities are founded in strong work ethics, which are institutionalized in our corporate social responsibility scheme. A distinguishing approach for an early stage investment vehicle, we promote and sustain this culture of responsible and ethical action amongst our investees and fellow entrepreneurs.
Linden’s CSR Scheme
Linden Ventures is strongly committed to transparency and high ethical standards as well as responsible and sustainable behaviour towards our shareholders, portfolio companies and all other stakeholders. We know that the new venture setting contains general as well as specific and unique ethical challenges, which we comprehensively identify, analyze and address in our investment decisions, and in the operative business support for portfolio companies.
More concretely, we rely on and promote a model of decision making which integrates the three lenses of ethics, law and economics, with ethics being the first lens through which we consider our decisions and actions. In this, just as for the economic dimension, we developed measures and metrics for our ethical and social performance. These are based on both deontological and teleological theories, with a focus on virtue ethics and utilitarianism. Below is a graphical representation of this model, depicting the clearly defined space which we operate: Strictly only where the three spheres overlap.
Our investors, portfolio companies and employees can be confident that we are committed to this culture and strictly follow our CSR approach. Unmistakable and consistently implemented policies and clear communication of their subject matter, along with training and ongoing consultation, are the key tools that enable us to make the CSR scheme integral part of our own culture and the culture of our entrepreneurial ecosystem.
