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.

Doing Sustaiable 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 realworld 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.

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.