STR 3650 Doing Sustainable Business
STR 3650 Doing Sustainable Business
This course is a digital online course .
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 international landscape. This is an applied strategy course.
Doing Sustainable Business is a final semester capstone course that aims 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 insights to arrive at well-argued decisions. The course will provide a learning process based on solving business cases in teams across specializations, thereby training students in interdisciplinary collaboration, teamwork, and oral presentation. All 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, 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 digital classes that focus on helping the students tackle the cases and team dynamics. Third, students will be offered a skills toolbox with videos to refresh knowledge, methods, and skills from previous courses to support case analysis, case solution, and presentation.
During the course students will acquire knowledge of:
- how to develop sustainable strategies for solving complex business problems in multidisciplinary teams,
- how to analytically approach complex business problems by applying established theoretical models, strategy frameworks, and tools,
- how to develop documented and clear recommendations that companies and organizations can act upon (make decisions about).
After completing the course, students should be able to:
- define and scope complex business problems, break them down into manageable parts, and analyze and use data to support arguments,
- evaluate and develop a firm’s value creation and business model, as well as its strategic positioning, including balancing exploration and exploitation,
- make clear, and convincing oral and written presentations of complex business problems and outline feasible and productive solutions
- assess the skills and knowledge needed to successfully solve firms' challenges
Ability to
- reflect on the role of responsible leadership, sustainability, and ethics in business,
- collaborate in multidisciplinary teams, including facilitating productive collaborative processes and solving conflicts that might arise in such collaborations,
- reflect on how strategies for solving complex problems may produce indirect effects and include important trade-offs both internal and external to the company.
This course is a capstone course in which bachelor students work on solving cases 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 materials will be offered to support the specific challenges of the cases presented.
The learning process will be facilitated via a varied set of synchronous and asynchronous digital elements: Plenary sessions, small seminar classes, workshops, as well as videos and case materials.
Software tools: Excel
Teaching
The main vehicle for learning will be students working to solve cases in teams. This will be supported by webinars and group discussions.
The case work will be supported by skills development materials to refresh important skills relevant to the presented cases. We will provide asynchronous video presentations of strategy and sustainability frameworks as well as case presentations.
Re-sit exam
Students who do not get the work requirement approved in the course are not allowed to take the exam. This means that they must take the entire course again when completing it later.
Students who do not pass the exam or who wish to improve their grade can take a new re-sit exam when the exam is completed later.
Higher Education Entrance Qualification.
Disclaimer
Deviations in teaching and exams may occur if external conditions or unforeseen events call for this.
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| Mandatory coursework | Courseworks given | Courseworks required | Comment coursework |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mandatory | 4 | 3 | Three out of four case assignments must be handed in and passed. This is team work, and students are assigned to teams. Case assignments are handed in both as a video presentation (where all team members are presenting) and power point presentations or word documents. |
| Assessments |
|---|
Exam category: Submission Form of assessment: Portfolio Assessment PDF Exam/hand-in semester: First Semester Weight: 100 Grouping: Group (4 - 5) Duration: 1 Semester(s) Exam code: STR 36501 Grading scale: ECTS Resit: Examination every semester |
| Activity | Duration | Comment |
|---|---|---|
Webinar | 10 Hour(s) | 5 webinars to prepare students for solving cases that are work requirements |
Feedback activities and counselling | 4 Hour(s) | A small number of teams meet with faculty and discuss the case assignments |
Digital resources | 15 Hour(s) | Video recorded lectures, interviews with case company executives and experts, as well as skills tool box material |
Group work / Assignments | 131 Hour(s) | Work with your team to solve the case assignments |
Individual problem solving | 40 Hour(s) | Individually prepare reading syllabus and read the cases |
A course of 1 ECTS credit corresponds to a workload of 26-30 hours. Therefore a course of 7,5 ECTS credit corresponds to a workload of at least 200 hours.
These elements are submitted by inter-disciplinary groups of 4-5 students, and are weighted equally. The group work will be in BI-administered groups.