Much heavy lifting remains, but sustainability-linked topics are increasingly being integrated into core and elective courses at business schools – an encouraging development as Corporate Knights publishes its 2019 “Better World” MBA global rankings. This year, 146 schools (up from 141 in 2018) were evaluated for their sustainability performance, based on publicly available data, on faculty research, citations in top journals, core course content and relevant research institutes and centres.

“Now more than ever is the best time to be involved in this area,” says Frederik Dahlmann, associate professor of strategy and sustainability at the Warwick Business School, which retained top spot in the Better World rankings for the second year in a row.

Dahlmann praises an earlier generation of scholars as “groundbreakers” who raised sustainability as a legitimate topic for leading academic journals.

“They have been championing research on sustainability directly as editors of those [academic] journals or through special issues,” he says. “I think there is a two-way recognition now that mainstream management journals have to be a bit more responsive to those wider needs, beyond what is typically seen as management issues.”

Research collaboration across disciplines is another growing phenomenon. York University’s Schulich School of Business, which moved into sole possession of second place in this year’s rankings, highlights the large number of its faculty, 46 in all and from diverse disciplines, who participated in research reviewed in the Better World analysis.

These professors account for more than half of Schulich’s full-time tenure stream, according to a school spokesman, drawn from marketing, entrepreneurship and supply chain management, not just ethics and corporate social responsibility.

At Duquesne University’s Palumbo-Donahue School of Business, with an MBA in sustainable business practices that dates to 2007, Murrin Chair of Global Competitiveness Robert Sroufe also sees momentum. “There are more special designations for groups and professional societies that are looking at sustainability,” he says, along with a growing number of journal proposal calls for contributions exploring the United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

In July, Management Science announced plans for a special issue on business and climate change, commenting that “far too little research is being conducted to provide the critical insights that companies and managers need” to respond to global warming.

Schools are also looking to up their game to teach the next generation of leaders.

Palumbo-Donahue, for example, is turning its building into a “living laboratory” to measure energy and water efficiency, air quality and carbon dioxide emissions. This fall, the information will be posted live on a 55-inch television at the school so students, researchers and visitors can see first-hand one building’s environmental impact.

“We are finding our indoor air quality is 2.5 times better than it is outdoors,” says Sroufe, of data collected so far. “Outdoor air quality is a big issue globally, so now we can start challenging people on how do we make this better, indoors and outdoors, while saving money doing it.”

Changes are also coming to the classroom, with new or enhanced sustainability content in core and elective courses.

This year, the University of Guelph’s Gordon S. Lang School of Business and Economics introduced a required first-year MBA course, Business Fundamentals, to explore sustainable development, ethical management, cross-cultural management and diversity. New course electives are also planned for not-for-profit and municipal government managers to learn about environmental issues.

“It’s an easy sell,” says Rumina Dhalla, corporate social responsibility coordinator at Lang and coordinator of the MBA graduate program. “The MBA faculty members are very keen to be successful and make it interesting.”

Dhalla, who teaches organization studies and sustainable commerce in the Department of Management, also sees demand from two other sources. Students, she says, want to turn their two-year sustainable commerce degrees into “green” careers, while employers are hungry for graduates “with that value added” of sustainability.

Schools, though, take different approaches to teaching sustainability – a specialized track in some MBA programs and the centrepiece of others.

Next fall, the Gustavson School of Business at the University of Victoria plans to introduce a 16-month MBA in sustainable innovation, replacing its current MBA.

Delivering content through an elective or specialization “is putting sustainability in a box,” argues David Dunne, director of Gustavson’s MBA programs. “You need to weave sustainability and technology and innovation into every course so that the finance professor is not teaching [students] how to make a million dollars but is teaching finance for impact and looking at how sustainable investment funds work.”

Despite sustainability’s rising profile, Warwick’s Dahlmann offers a word of caution. “There is a lot more noise now and more general talk about sustainability, but if you look at the numbers on global greenhouse gas emissions, we have a long way to go.”

Jennifer Lewington is a writer and editor on education and urban affairs.

Click here for 2019 Better World MBA Ranking results.

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Cristine Sousa
Managing director of New Generation Consulting

Cristine Sousa, with a strong family history of community engagement, arrived in Portugal in 2014 on a full scholarship for a master’s of international management at the Nova School of Business and Economics. The two-year program, including a six-month exchange at Erasmus University’s Rotterdam School of Management, is offered through Nova’s membership in a global alliance of business schools known as CEMS. For her degree, Sousa specialized in social enterprises.

“The social space was so untouched, and that was a space where I could really learn and grow,” says the 30-year-old Canada-Portugal dual citizen. “I kept saying to myself, ‘It is about time that business schools are offering such programs.’”

At Nova, Sousa joined New Generation Consulting, a CEMS-affiliated pro bono consulting organization that assigns virtual teams of students and alumni from alliance schools to consult for clients around the world. In one case, Sousa and her CEMS team advised Life Project 4 Youth, a charity in the Philippines that coaches low-income youth to become entrepreneurs. In a rare opportunity for an NGC participant, Sousa spent a year in the Philippines implementing her team’s recommendations.

Back in Toronto in 2017, she focused on social entrepreneurship, declining an invitation to resume her previous banking career. She joined Bmeaningful, a jobs board oriented to socially conscious employers, but recently embarked on a new venture. She’s building a digital platform for fundraising events that connect charities and small and medium-sized companies, the latter often overlooked for their corporate social responsibility potential.

She continues to volunteer for New Generation Consulting, serving as president until mid-2020. Over the past six years, the organization has worked with 40 clients on more than 60 projects around the world.

“I wanted to be part of something where I can really see the results,” she says. “[NGC] has given me such a sense of belonging and being part of something.” As president, Sousa says she wants “to maintain a sense of community” through a newsletter and other initiatives to strengthen links between alumni and clients.

Jesse Moore
Co-founder and CEO of M-KOPA Solar

For Jesse Moore, the realization that he could generate profits and deliver social impact came to him in his early 20s. Then working for CARE Canada, the global anti-poverty organization, he helped found a business unit that invests in low-income entrepreneurs.

Now 41 and chief executive officer of M-KOPA Solar, Moore hasn’t wavered in his belief.

Founded in 2012 by Moore and two others, the Nairobi-based company has sold more than 750,000 off-the-grid solar systems to low-income customers in five African countries as a cheaper, safer alternative to kerosene. Customers use mobile phones to buy power in installments – 50 cents to one dollar at a time – which translates into $650 in a household’s savings over five years, according to M-KOPA (M for mobile, KOPA for borrowed in Swahili). Over time, customers own their solar system and, with good credit scores, can upgrade to buy more power or purchase a fridge or television.

“We are not a solar company; we are more of an asset-financing platform where solar happens to be a really big need,” says Moore, whose enterprise operates with a staff of 900 employees and more than 2,200 sales agents.

M-KOPA has garnered multiple awards, including a Fortune magazine top-50 list of companies changing the world.

In 2006, Toronto-born Moore won a Skoll Foundation full scholarship to Oxford University’s Saïd Business School for a one-year master’s of business administration. The degree, he says, “gave me a foundation and an ability to be much more confident about the business world.”

After graduation, he worked at Vodafone UK, where he met one of his co-founders, Nick Hughes, currently strategy director for M-KOPA. Chad Larson, the third co-founder and an Oxford Saïd graduate, is the company’s finance director.

Moore advises those seeking to do good and do well to take risks, focus on solving someone’s problem and stay close to the customer.

At M-KOPA, he says, “we will be continuing to improve the offering of different products that can empower low-income consumers in emerging markets.”

Emily Bland
Founder of SucSeed Social Enterprises

When Emily Bland talks about food insecurity, she cites two numbers. One is a United Nations estimate of a 70% rise in food production required by 2050 to feed the world’s growing population. The other relates to her home province of Newfoundland and Labrador, where only 10% of fresh produce is locally grown, down from 95% 60 years ago.

Bland is doing something about it. At 25, she’s the chief executive of SucSeed Social Enterprises, which assembles low-cost (about $400) hydroponic kits for residents in rural and remote communities to grow leafy greens and for school children to learn about food security and healthy eating.

“Food security has always been close to my heart,” says Bland, the “Seed-EO” of a company that has sold more than 1,500 kits in Canada and generated more than $500,000 in sales over the past two years. “I believe in my gut that SucSeed is a big part of what we need in Atlantic Canada to create food sustainability and to empower the next generation.”

SucSeed put down roots in 2016 when Bland and students at Memorial University’s Faculty of Business Administration dreamed up the project for their campus chapter of Enactus, a global network of social entrepreneurs. Homeless youth in

St. John’s, recruited by a local non-profit, assemble the garden-in-a-box and gain job experience. SucSeed won top prize at the Enactus global competition in 2016.

Bland credits Enactus – and supportive professors– for stoking her appetite for social entrepreneurship. “You are empowering young people in their late teens and early 20s to see that they can actually make a difference in the world,” she says.

After graduating in 2017, she turned down a full-time job with a national accounting firm to run SucSeed. Now Bland and her four-person company are exploring new markets, especially young elementary school students in Canada and the United States. “We are empowering the next generation to take control of their food security,” she says.

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For more detailed scoring, return to 2019 Better World MBA Ranking main page and click on ‘free results.’

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Review the full methodology here HERE.

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