The information below may be applicable to any juniors or
seniors who can take management courses or have open electives and are
interested in sustainability in a business context, consulting, innovation,
and/or real world experience working on a dynamic sustainability project with a
company. The projects course has a prerequisite whereas the innovation course
does not. Both are restricted to only juniors and seniors. It was a senior
level restriction and that will be updated today if it has not been
already.
I wanted to introduce myself and our center and let you know
about 2 new courses we have developed that I will be teaching in the spring.
Our new Center for Business Strategies for Sustainability launched earlier this
year and I joined Georgia Tech as Professor of the Practice of Sustainable
Business as well as director of the Center in July. See below and attached for
more information.
In addition to these courses, if you have students that are
especially interested in sustainability in the business context or would be
interested in projects, co-ops, internships, volunteering with us, please let me
know. We are still in early launch / set-up mode here this school year but are
interested in understanding the demand, interest, and opportunities across the
Institute as we develop our priorities and activities over time.
Here are the course descriptions. Feel free to let me know if
you have any questions or suggestions.
MGT 4803 Sustainable
Business Projects
Prerequisites:
MGT3150, Principles of Management, or MGT 4102 Management
Consulting.
Current senior
restriction; will likely be junior/senior restriction
shortly.
The purpose of this course is
to help you gain a working knowledge of the various and evolving ways firms
approach sustainability (environmental and social) and then apply this learning
by solving a real problem for a company in a consulting team environment. In
addition to readings and class activities, during the course you will bid on and
be assigned to a real-life sustainability consulting project for a company and
work on a team with classmates for 8 – 10 weeks. Your performance on this
project, both individually and as a team, will be a major component of the final
grade. For those of you interested in working directly in areas related to
sustainability during your careers, this class will help you gain critical
knowledge and skills towards that goal. For others it will offer a valuable
point of view on a subject of increasing importance to managers and leaders
across all functions and industries.
The class will focus on three
main areas: sustainability topics and frameworks, basic consulting skills and
tools, and specific needs or challenges on your consulting projects. We will
use a variety of methods including readings, research, written assignments,
group exercises, lecture, and discussion.
MGT 4803 Innovation
Tournaments for Sustainability
No
prerequisites.
Current senior
restriction; will likely be junior/senior restriction
shortly.
This course guides students
through a systematic process for idea generation, selection, and impact with a
focus on environmental or social issues that need to be solved. It puts
structure around the process of innovation by teaching frameworks and methods
for mastering innovation, supported by logic and empirical evidence. While this
may seem daunting if you have never flexed your entrepreneurial muscles, I
guarantee you will have a lot of fun and learn a lot from
it.
The learning objectives of the
course include learning a process- and design-thinking based view of idea
generation and business model design, refining a business model using the
business model canvass concept, understanding trade-offs between economic,
environmental and social objectives, and developing research and synthesis
skills using doing in-depth environmental/social impact analysis. The course
starts with idea tournaments, a process that leverages the wisdom of the crowd.
It continues with the application of basic experimenting/prototyping and
business model innovation frameworks, emphasizing a systematic risk-limiting
pathway to realizing entrepreneurial outcomes, with sustainability metrics in
mind.
The course is instructor-guided
in terms of process and basic tools, but almost entirely student-driven; doing
the research, generating the ideas, finding the information and the resources
you need at each stage will all be your responsibility. Expect this to be a
demanding, but rewarding process. The learning from the process, the research,
the feedback and the experience will help you whether you want to capitalize on
a business opportunity in a company, or whether you want to strike out on your
own one day.
