Business schools are made up of expert faculty, diverse stakeholders and students, with a range of experiences from across countries, disciplines and industries. Together this offers a unique, and underutilized, laboratory to explore and test solutions to push sustainability forward in ways that benefit both business and society at large.

The challenge is that it isn’t just society that often fails to recognize the important role that business schools play; the schools themselves often fail to recognize their role and the increasing range of opportunities that sustainability can offer them, particularly now that the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are in place.

A look at the 2017 Top 40 Better World MBA ranking demonstrates that this is beginning to change, with business schools around the world taking their own ideas of how to make sustainability the business of business education and putting them into practice.

Author and sustainability advisor Giselle Weybrecht delves deeper into some of these more innovative approaches here, looking at examples from both the Top 40 schools and other programs from around the world.

In first place this year is the University of Exeter Business School, which barely edged out perennial winner Schulich School of Business at York University as well as Warwick Business School on the strength of its curriculum. All three programs earned top marks for their institutes and centres, along with faculty research.

Following the top three were the Copenhagen Business School and Duquesne University’s Palumbo Donahue School of Business.

The 2017 list represented a 17.5 per cent turnover rate from last year’s list, welcoming new schools such as the University of Edinburgh Business School and the University of Victoria’s Peter B. Gustavson School of Business.

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Note: Warwick Business School was listed in the Oct. 16th print version of Corporate Knights as finishing 3rd in the 2017 Better World MBA Ranking, while it in fact tied for 2nd place alongside the Schulich School of Business. We regret the error.

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The ideas include adding “shifts” into the curriculum, moments when students are unexpectedly placed in a situation they need to resolve.

There is a course called “From Day 1,” which brings students and faculty from across disciplines together to discuss current events, the impact they have on the business involved and what they would do if they were in charge (and following what actually happens). The Lifetime MBA invites alumni back to campus for a range of additional modules throughout their lives, including at retirement or upon returning to work after starting a family. Another idea involves eliminating all courses and instead engaging students in a number of interdisciplinary experiences throughout the degree focused on identifying challenges and opportunities and acting on them. Many of the ideas don’t even mention sustainability by name; they are about creating graduates who can question assumptions, listen effectively, work across culture, collaborate, who have an understanding of the world around them and can make better decisions as a result.
 

Collaborating with business to explore solutions

A growing number of business schools are setting themselves up as testing labs for new sustainability ideas and helping partner organizations move forward on theirs. For example, since 2013, Copenhagen Business School has been working with the Roskilde Festival, the second largest music festival in Europe. Researchers use the festival, which brings together 130,000 people into a temporary city for two weeks every year, to research sustainable solutions for cities on a small scale that might be applicable to other communities.

Ideas for Action, a joint initiative of the World Bank Group and the Wharton School, invites students from around the world to devise innovative new strategies for financing the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Winners earn the opportunity to present their ideas to the World Bank Group and receive support from a project incubator at Wharton.

Business school INCAE and Nespresso formed a partnership in 2013 to launch a global case study challenge where the company presents a specific sustainability challenge it is facing each year for students to work on. The winning teams have a chance to implement their ideas with Nespresso.

Duke Fuqua School of Business’ CASE i3 Consulting Program pairs students with leading organizations on impact investing projects, including developing impact due diligence guidelines for investors and doing market analysis and investment landscaping.

Second-year MBA students at Haas School of Business can apply to be fund managers of the Haas Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) Fund, the first and largest student-led SRI fund within a leading business school. The fund has more than doubled the initial investment to over $2 million (U.S.) since 2008 and empowered new generations of graduates around SRI and environmental, social and governance investment strategies and practices.

Opportunities within the curriculum

In addition to embedding sustainability into all courses, schools are reinforcing these messages through a series of courses that focus on the interdisciplinary nature of sustainability. A number of schools, including Griffith University in Australia, are requiring MBA students to take a course in systems thinking. These introduce and address the challenges of making decisions within the context of complex business systems with multiple stakeholders and short- and long-term social, environmental and economic consequences.

The Rotterdam School of Management is one of seven European business schools that concurrently take part in the Climate Change Course. The course is followed by a two-day simulation of UN climate negotiations with master-level students from the participating schools, giving them knowledge and first-hand experience in finding climate change solutions on a global scale.

At HEC Montréal, a popular course on business history involves a 12-day, 500-kilometre cycling trip across the region. The experience seeks to expose students to how politics, culture and environment influence the economic development of the region.

Engaging the community

Business schools are also acting as enablers to help their communities engage in sustainability. For example, a number of schools in the U.S. offer a board program where students are matched with a local non-profit board of directors for 14 months and serve as a non-voting board member, while also being paired up with a mentor.

Students at the University of Wollongong can become a volunteer mentor in the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience. The country-wide program supports Indigenous students throughout high school, university and beyond with the aim of bringing high school graduation and university admission rates among Indigenous youth in line with the rates of other students.

While in-person initiatives have an important impact, virtual ones are reaching a wider audience. The Haas School of Business’ Philanthropy University provides free online courses, such as How to Scale Social Impact, which have already been viewed by over 225,000 social change makers from 180 countries. The courses can be combined to earn a Certificate of Social Sector Leadership from Berkeley-Haas.

It’s part of a growing number of sustainability-focused, publicly available courses provided online, many with interactive elements. Students enrolled in Copenhagen Business School’s Becoming a Social Entrepreneur online course form virtual teams with others from around the world to study a problematic issue, develop an idea and business model around a solution, and then compete in a virtual business plan competition.

Sustainability within the school itself

Courses on sustainability will have limited impact if the school itself isn’t practising what it preaches. Business schools are increasingly looking at sustainability within their operations and creating supportive environments to enable their students to engage on campus. At the University of British Columbia, the yearly Changemaker Showcase engages and connects students seeking to start sustainability projects, whether these are on campus or a new business. Students can also tap into a number of grants to help them launch their social change project.

PhD students at the University of Nottingham started the Sustainability Research Network with the aim of creating a platform where those working on sustainability topics could meet one another and share ideas and expertise across disciplines. Today there are over 370 members from 23 different schools including business, engineering, education and sciences, and the network has spread across to the university’s Malaysia campus.

The ID@work project at Antwerp Management School aims to support organizations in attracting, developing and retaining employees with intellectual disabilities. The school, in collaboration with researchers with intellectual disabilities, has developed a coaching program for employers as well as a number of training courses.

As these examples show, many business schools are already implementing innovative sustainability-related ideas into their curriculum, research, partnerships and campuses. Through their students, research and graduates, they are becoming an indispensable resource for leaders and business looking to move forward in sustainability.

The potential impact, both positive and negative, that business schools collectively can have should not be taken for granted.

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These schools were assessed on three indicators: curriculum, institutes and centres, and faculty research. Data for these three indicators was collected from publicly available sources. Outreach was conducted to each of those schools for verification and confirmation prior to completion of the ranking.

1. Curriculum: Only core/required courses fully dedicated to sustainability were counted under the scoring (maximum 5 courses, 30 per cent weighting)
2. Institutes and Centres: Only relevant institutes affiliated with the business school regardless of location, sponsored or run in partnership with another school, were counted towards the scoring (maximum 5 institutes and centres, 20 per cent weighting)
3. Faculty Research: All research was conducted using the business school’s website and Google Scholar. All relevant peer-reviewed publications in academic journals were considered between 2014 and 2016. Thirty per cent of the final score was derived from total number of relevant publications authored or co-authored per faculty member of a given business school (maximum total published work with faculty ration of 1:1, 30 per cent weighting). The other 20 per cent is in relation to the total number of times those publications were cited (maximum average citations of 10, 20 per cent weighting)

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