Sustainability, Innovation, and Leadership: Towards a Sustainable Economy

Business in Society

This module seeks to enable students to understand the concepts and debates on sustainability at the firm level. By doing so the module focuses on the bigger context of sustainability innovation within the triple-bottom-line and the responsible enterprise. Thorough study of the module will help students to understand and respond to the opportunities of sustainability innovation as “business in society”.

Equally, the students will seek to understand and critically evaluate the role of leadership in implementing change. To this end engagement with traditional and critical perspectives on “leadership” will be discussed to reflect on the role of leadership in meeting the challenges of environmental and social sustainability.

·Introduction to “Business in Society”

·Corporate Social Responsibility: People, Planet, Profit and the Triple Bottom Line

·Green & Clean Technology and Innovation for Sustainability Transition

·Business Models for Sustainability Transition

·Measuring Sustainability Conduct

·Industry Challenges and Practices of the Circular Economy

·Professional services: Sustainability Reporting, Sustainability Consulting

·The nature of leadership: social psychological, sociological, historical and political science perspectives

·The role of power in leadership and change

·Transactional, transformational, transforming and charismatic leadership

·Collaborative and distributed leadership

·Defining leadership for sustainability transition

·Case examples to discuss the role of leadership in change processes

·Case examples of institutions using leadership in change processes

·Professional services: Leadership as consultancy

At the end of this module, students will be able to:

Knowledge

1. Discuss innovation theory and corporate social responsibility concepts in the context of a circular economy and environmental challenges

2. Understand key issues relating to Environmental Sound Technologies/Green & Clean

Technology and their deployment

3. Analyse different styles of leadership and show an understanding of why/how different styles of leadership might be effective.

4. Understand pre-requisites of ethical leadership and leadership for sustainability

5. Identify and analyse business opportunities from new sustainable technologies and business models

6. Evaluate the role of leadership in meeting the challenges of sustainability  – environmental and social

7. Analyse markets with regard to environmental sustainability

8. Evaluate the role of leadership within the management profession

Skills for life and work (general skills)

9. Ability to gather empirical evidence from secondary sources and public data

The module is core for Business Management students. There are no prerequisites, co-requisites, pre-cursors to start. A range of teaching methods will be employed including lectures, seminars, guided reading and independent study, case studies, virtual learning environment.

To keep up to date with module and teaching information students are advised to regularly check the module’s Moodle page and any relevant information concerning the module sent through to you by email.

Corporate Social Responsibility: People, Planet, Profit and the Triple Bottom Line

The module assessment is comprised of two pieces of coursework (each piece of coursework needs to be 2,500 words max).

(a)Structure of assignment and assessment task

There is one coursework to be submitted consisting of the reflective task (Part A) and the applied analytical task (Part B).

After combining both parts (Part A and B) of Assessment 1 the structure of your submission should look as follows (recommended word count in parentheses)

Section #1 – Part A – Reflection

Section #2 – Part B – Chosen company and its Sustainability Offerings

Section #3 – Part B – Relevant literature

Section #4 – Part B – The chosen company’s Sustainability Stakeholders

Section #5 – Part B – Sustainability Benchmark

Section #6 – Part B – Recommendations for Managers

Section #7 – Conclusions

Section #8 – List of References

Section #9 – Appendix from Seminar Diary Notes

Section #10 – Other Appendices [optional]

Part A

The seminar case studies discuss aspects of sustainable production, consumption or innovation, for either a selected industry or product domain. In part A, students are asked to write a reflective piece about the material discussed in the seminars.

1.Please search for examples of sustainability issues in your daily life, which are connected to the specific theme and case study covered in seminar. The question at the end of weekly seminar case study sheet will guide you as to what aspects to reflect on. Create a diary of the examples of sustainability issues covered.

2.The word budget of your diary notes should be about 200 words each week. Attach all diary notes as appendix to your final coursework submission. There are four case studies for reflection, thus the appendix from the diary notes should not exceed 800 words.

3.For Section #1 (recommended word count: 400) – Answer the following question and make use of the diary notes appendix:

“Discuss how concepts of the sustainable and circular economy can be put into practice in our consumer society.”

Part B

The lectures provide you with concepts, readings and examples of sustainability from a business perspective.

In part B, students are asked to engage in case study research relating to a company of their choice. The chosen company must either offer ‘Green Technology as Products’ or engage in ‘New Business Models for Sustainability’, as defined and discussed in the lecture.

The questions to be discussed in Part B can be found below. Please always apply your considerations and discussion points to the chosen company (recommended word count in parentheses):

For Section #2 – Discuss and classify how the sustainability offerings (products, services, procurement or business model facilitation) of your chosen company specifically focus on environmental sustainability. Make use of the company’s Annual Report or its Sustainability Report(s), and cite such reports where used. Answer this question:

(i)What is the company’s approach to making profit from sustainability?

For Section #3 – Refer to about six relevant literature sources to explain how the selected company may best pursue sustainability for its offerings. Use the literature section to define the concepts used or applied therein. You may use journal articles using Scopus (http://www.scopus.com)

For Section #4 – Identify various stakeholders connected to production or consumption of the relevant products or services and discuss their interests in the company’s efforts towards corporate social responsibility

For Section #5– Sustainability benchmark - Select two graphs embodying documented data from the chosen company’s sustainability report, press releases or any other relevant reports by/on the company. Answer the following questions on the reported data:

(a) How could the two graphs be improved and used for the purpose of comparing the company with its competitors? (competitors meant as companies operating in the same industry/on the same market)

(b) Present an improved version of the graphs which reveal more detailed or more accurate information in an intuitive way. Do not just change the graphical style/colours etc. but rather make meaningful changes to the kind of graph itself.

(c) Which other companies (either within the same industry or within the same product/services domain) would be suitable for the purpose of comparison? Justify your response with industry-specific challenges, challenges for making a sustainability offering or other suitable factors related to environmental sustainability or corporate social responsibility.