Businesses and societies are experiencing significant challenges in ensuring that stakeholders, which can include owners, employees, customers, suppliers, community members, peer organizations, and other interest groups, achieve and maintain well-being in the uncertain future. These challenges, which can be economic, environmental, and social, can also be seen as opportunities to achieve and maintain both internal and external success and satisfaction.
Sustainability issues such as climate change, social equity, biodiversity preservation, and poverty elimination are becoming critical with time. Businesses and other societal groups need to continuously adopt and apply innovative approaches to effectively address these issues. Dematerialization, product stewardship, renewable energy generation, biomimicry, and circular economy are a few examples of how businesses are turning challenges into opportunities for future well-being. This course identifies a wide range of strategies and illustrates how businesses and other organizations can effectively implement sustainable innovation approaches.
- Unit 1: Definitions and Concepts
- Unit 2: Sustainability Policies, Practices, and Leadership
- Unit 3: Integrating Entrepreneurship with Innovation and Sustainability
- Identify the key components of innovation and sustainability and their connection to one another;
- Assess issues related to innovation and sustainability by identifying pros and cons of certain courses of action, and the ethical and values-based roots of those issues;
- Analyze cultural, ideological, and practical perspectives on innovation and sustainability and ways individuals, communities and organizations express these perspectives and put them into practice; and
- Incorporate elements of innovative sustainability to a specific business or sector by developing a hypothetical entrepreneurial startup organization.