**5. Conclusions**

In looking to understand how senior CSR leaders currently perceive and act on CSR, this paper has shown how the nature of CSR is still evolving for businesses. As outlined here, senior managers who were interviewed from 'high end' global businesses view CSR as being superseded by broader ideas about sustainability and sustainable development. Respondents cited social media and TV programs, particularly the UK BBC Blue Planet series, to illustrate the pressures on them to respond to changing agendas within wider society. The SDGs framework was considered useful in helping business to engage with CSR and sustainability at both a strategic and practical level. Delivering against these goals, respondents talked about the importance of the overall supply chain, communication with stakeholders, scientific targets, and new business models. When talking about SMEs, there seemed to be some assumptions made but also an acknowledgement that they were key players in delivering agile and innovative responses. There are clearly many opportunities to facilitate joint working between global companies and SMEs within the supply chain.

One of the key contributions of this paper is that it reveals a policy shift in UK global businesses from CSR to sustainability with responsible senior managers increasingly recognizing the SDGs as a valuable sustainability framework for their companies. It is also one of the first papers to explore the potential for knowledge sharing between global companies and SMEs linked to the SDGs from the business perspective. It is not yet known how successful businesses will be in delivering the SDGs or how successful the SDGs will be in delivering their goals [60]. What the findings in this paper show is that several high-profile global businesses have recognized opportunities within the SDGs to engage in what they portray as more meaningful action. Our findings add value to recent literature that explores the relationship between CSR and the SDGs in business practice [7,8,88,89]. In many respects, our research demonstrates that the SDGs offer global businesses (and SMEs) 'a unique opportunity to use the SDGs as a framework for improving CSR engagement' [88] (p. 42).

Based on respondents' comments, the SDGs appear to offer a framework that is clearer and more inspiring than ISO 26000 and can capture the imagination of senior leaders to promote innovation and new business models. Based on these research findings, the argument is that businesses of all sizes can make use of scientific targets within the SDGs to contribute to sustainability and tell both a qualitative story and to measure business progress. The potential to use the SDGs as a framework and common language may help support innovation and communication between different forms of organizations within the supply chain. Such increased communication may further support approaches such as the circular economy with the opportunity to engage smaller businesses with the redesign of components, design for longevity, and repair and reuse. While the potential to further explore the relevance of the SDGs to SMEs is an opportunity for further research, the findings from this study have been used with some success to design MBA-level teaching based on the SDGs as a framework for ethics, responsibility, and sustainability [90]. SMEs can use the SDGs to help them engage with CSR and sustainability by understanding their impact on environment and society, and what they can do to reduce that impact and contribute, instead, to the solutions. In this way, the SDGs bring responsibility to the heart of what the organization does rather than in what it 'gives back'. Promoting SME engagement within a similar framework should enable the development of both CSR and new sustainable business and economic models and help to facilitate both partnership and innovation across the supply chain and wider stakeholder collaboration linked to the SDGs [57–59].

**Author Contributions:** Writing—original draft, S.W.; Writing—review, redrafting & editing, D.F.M. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.

**Data Availability Statement:** Not applicable.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
