Topic outline

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    In the course “How to change the world: Innovating toward sustainability”, we work with global environmental and social sustainability problems and their potential solutions. The course aims at exploring alternative paths for creative and innovative responses to sustainability challenges. Global sustainability challenges are taken as starting points for innovating new forms of individual action, economic activity, business models, and organizational forms. The course addresses sustainability innovation from the following main perspectives: sustainable business models and sustainability innovations, inclusive business in low-income markets, various forms of entrepreneurship for sustainability ventures, intrapreneurship for sustainability context of large organizations, and change advocacy and leadership. We employ a variety of interactive working methods, which encourage students to explore and reflect upon their own thinking patterns and develop new ideas in a collaborative manner. 

    Through lectures, exercises, a team project and practitioner talks, the students gain understanding of wicked societal problems related to sustainability: what they are, how they can be approached, how they are connected to each other and why it is important to tackle them. More importantly, the students explore alternative paths for creative and innovative responses to sustainability challenges. We both provide the students with information of the known approaches to sustainability innovation and entrepreneurship as well as encourage their personal reflection in finding their own approaches and roles as change makers. The students gain an understanding of how these vast challenges can be approached with realistic and plausible actions and what kind of different strategies can be identified. The students also try out these approaches in their course project as they collaboratively set up a social or sustainability enterprise and aim to develop an innovative response to a clearly focused sustainability issue.  


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