Sustainable Development Strategies – Global, Regional, Local and Institutional

obligatory courses

Basic understanding of sustainable development challenges.

Classroom

The course aims at translating macro-level sustainability considerations, encapsulated in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), into micro-level strategies formulated in a social enterprise project. Building upon the concepts of Strategic Management, Sustainability and Design Thinking it reveals how the individual actors may address sustainability challenges in their strategies and how they measure, assess and report strategy implementation.

Students will be exposed to a number of real-life strategic dilemmas involving sustainability pressures, and encouraged to make their own decisions, using analytical tools and field research They will learn to build business models that address sustainability challenges and stakeholder pressures and discuss sustainability with invited guest speakers

The course will be composed of 9 modules centered around phases of design thinking process:

1.Discovery

2. Intepretation.

3. Ideation

4. Experimentation

5. Evolution

• Frynas, J.G., Mellahi, K. (2015). Global strategic management, Oxford University Press.

• Jorgensen, S., Pedersen, L. (2018). RESTART Sustainable Business Model Innovation, Palgrave.

• Osterwalder, A., Pigneur, Y. (2010). Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers. John Wiley & Sons.

• Cases selected from the repositories of Harvard Business School, Ivey Business School and Emerald Emerging Market Case Study Collection.

Upon successfull completion of the course students will:

- identify opportunities and threats in the political, economic, social and technological environment of organisations;

- analyse competitive forces shaping industries;

- perform stakeholder analysis;

- identify strategic resources, strenghts and weaknesses of organisations;

- collect and interpret data necessary to formulate organisational strategy;

- build business models which address sustainability challenges.

K_W03; K_W05; K_W07; K_W09; K_U02; K_U03; K_U04; K_U09; K_K01; K_K03; K_K05; K_K09; K_K10

Class participation (20%)

Group project (80%).

Group project description: students (working in small teams) will develop business models aimed at addressing sustainability challenges in a social enterprise. They will collect necessary data and analyse them using strategic management tools. Based their analyses, they will build business models for innovatve start-ups. They will communicate their business models in a ‘pitch session’, gathering various audiences (to groups of stakeholders). They will receive feedback from the audience.

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