STR XX31 Doing Sustainable Business
STR XX31 Doing Sustainable Business
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.
- solving complex business problems in multidisciplinary teams,
- how to analytically approach complex business problems by applying established theoretical models, strategy frameworks and tools, and
- developing documented and clear recommendations that companies and organizations can act upon (make decisions about).
- defining and scoping complex business problems, breaking them down into manageable parts, and analyzing and using data to support arguments,
- evaluating and developing a firm’s value creation and business model, as well as its strategic positioning, including balancing exploration and exploitation,
- making clear, and convincing oral and written presentations of complex business problems and outlining productive solutions,
- working in multidisciplinary teams in an effective and efficient manner.
Ability to
- reflect on the role of leadership, sustainability, and ethics in business,
- collaborate in multidisciplinary teams, including facilitating productive collaborative processes and solving conflicts that might arise in such collaborations
This course is a capstone course in which groups of bachelor students work on solving cases working in teams across academic disciplines.
The learning process will be facilitated via a varied set of in-person and digital elements: Plenary sessions, small seminar classes, workshops, as well as videos and case materials.
This is a course with continuous assessment (several exam components) and there will be one final exam code consisting of 3 elements handed in during the semester. Students who fail to participate in the required number of exam elements will get a lower grade or may fail the course. Detailed information about the points system and the cut off points with reference to the letter grades will be provided at semester start.
At resit, all required exam components must, as a main rule, be retaken during the next scheduled course.
Teaching
Information about what is taught on campus and via digital formats will be presented with the lecture plan before the start of the course each semester.
Students should have completed most of the exams from previous semesters and be able to draw on knowledge and methods from previous courses in their respective bachelor programs, including marketing, finance, financial management, economics, leadership and organization, law, communication, strategy, and analytics.
| Assessments |
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Exam category: Activity Form of assessment: Presentation |
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.
documented presentations of case solutions. Students will work in groups of five. Coaching and
feedback in seminar classes, and workshops for analysis techniques and skills development will
support students’ case solution processes.