Doing Sustainable Business

Introduction

All sectors in society increasingly need people trained in interdisciplinary collaboration and complex problem-solving to address critical societal challenges, particularly related to sustainability transition and digital transformation in an internationalizing landscape. This is an applied strategy course. 

Doing Sustainable Business is a final semester capstone course aiming to prepare students for strategic and entrepreneurial business development in practice. Students will learn to structure and analyze real world problems, utilizing skills, methods and knowledge across academic disciplines and perspectives, and combine the insights to arrive at well-argued decisions. The course will provide a learning process based on solving business cases in groups across specializations, thereby training students in interdisciplinary collaboration, teamwork, and oral presentation. All major cases in the course will address major societal challenges, such as described by UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The course takes a strategic approach to real life business problems, enabling the utilization and integration of knowledge, methods and skills gained across all bachelor courses and programs.

As a foundation to the case solution process, the course will introduce frameworks for developing sustainable firm-level strategies, contributing to the company’s ability to create and retain value.

During the semester, the students will be exposed to a three-layer learning model. First, students will be provided with overall introductions to cases, business development frameworks and case solution approaches. Second, a main part of the course consists of small classes, including forming of student groups, and coaching on case solution and team processes. Third, the students will be offered academic skill-shops to refresh knowledge, methods, and skills from previous courses to support case analysis, case solution and presentation.

Course content

This course is a capstone course in which groups of bachelor students work on solving cases working in teams across academic disciplines.

Core to the course is the solving of a set of sustainability-related business cases. In addition, introductory materials to theoretical frameworks and cases will be made available, and additional skill-development sessions may be offered to support the specific challenges of the cases presented.