Managing Climate Change Threats: The Role of Disruptive Innovations in Business Sustainability

Learning Outcomes

According to the learning outcomes for this module, this assignment will demonstrate that students can:

1. Exhibit a comprehensive understanding and sound judgement in developing proposals and solutions to reduce the impact of organisations as they seek to respond to these risks

2. Apply a range of advanced technical, academic and professional skills to and critically reflect on current trends in engineering for sustainability such as lifecycle analysis, green accounting, carbon trading, and risk assessment.

The UK government’s Industrial Strategy describe a partnership between government and the private sector to build the foundations of a strong economy, which are the skills of its workers, the quality of its infrastructure and a fair and predictable business environment. The strategy aims to foster innovation and identifies four ‘Grand Challenges’, one of which is clean growth.

1. Choose a business or business type and identify the threats to that business from:

• Climate change, and

• The policy and regulatory framework designed to mitigate climate change

2. Familiarise yourself with innovation theory and briefly summarise the following: disruptive innovation, incremental innovation and game changing innovation

3. Considering the products and services of the business you have identified above, write a management report that recommends one or more disruptive innovations that will address threats to the business from climate change. In your report, consider the following questions:

• Who will be the early adopters of your innovative products and/or services?

• How will your innovation lead to reductions in greenhouse gas emissions?

You will find it valuable to read the paper by Wilson et al (2018) entitled ‘The potential contribution of disruptive low-carbon innovations (DLCI) to 1.5° C climate mitigation’. This assignment will also require careful reading of the lessons used in this module as well as library research.

Your assignment report should be in the form of a management report of between 2,000 and 2,500 words, not including any references and appendices. Use appendices to include additional charts, illustrations and data as necessary, but the appendices should be no longer than 4 pages. This should be written as a practical report for decision makers rather than a theoretical treatise on climate change and innovation.

You should explain any pictures and diagrams you use, reference your sources correctly and choose suitable sources. You should use a font of size no less than 10 points. How the work will be marked:

Your mark will be based on the extent to which the learning outcomes have been met, and the extent to which the above instructions, notes and guidance are complied with (for example regarding word limit, style, structure and citation). The criteria below relate to the current pass mark of 50%.

• Introduction to the report – 10 marks

• Descriptions of threats to business from climate change and policy – 20 marks

• Summaries of three types of innovation – 20 marks

• Description of disruptive innovations to address threats to business – 40 marks

• Clarity of writing style, referencing and structure of report – 10 marks

Work that is deficient in most of the respects outlined above, showing no evidence of critical analysis will be awarded an outright fail of 44% or less. A marginal fail of 45% to 49% may be awarded to work that demonstrates some understanding of the problem but where the understanding, accuracy, organisation and critical analysis fail to justify a marginal pass.