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Excerpt from course description

Sustainable business in operations

Introduction

The world is facing major challenges in sustainability. Companies have a major role and tasks related to ensuring sustainable development. This is linked to new challenges and opportunities. This course consists of three course elements that address topics from a broader perspective.

  • SLM 8001 Sustainability Basics
  • SLM 8002 Sustainability and  Shared Value Creation
  • SLM 8003 Circular Economy and New Opportunities

New opportunities The UN's sustainability goals are the framework for how the world will develop until 2030. But, in practice, what do these goals mean and what do they mean for your company, employer or organization? This is the focus of this course. Key concepts and frameworks for sustainability, practical model for introducing sustainability in daily operations will be addressed. This is addressed in module 1 of the course package.

Central to the UN's 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (SDG) Goal  17, which is a call for action from all countries - developed and developing - in a global partnership. This course will follow up Course 1 Sustainability basic, with an explicit focus on goal 17, partnership. We want to transfer the idea of ​​partnership to an organizational level and focus on how companies and other entities create value together. This is the domain of collaboration strategy where the idea is to "get better with others", instead of trying to "be better than others". We will work with frameworks and tools that recognize the interdependencies that organizations need to work with in a systematic way in order to co-create value. Goal 17 is, in many ways, a meta-goal, or a means to an end, in the sense that the quality of partnerships, at different levels of analysis, has a significant impact on many other goals.

Circular economy challenges us by asking us to think about material flows in addition to cash flows in economic activities. Reduced waste, increased recycling and less pressure on non-renewable resources are all important building blocks for a sustainable future. This course therefore deals with why you need circular solutions and gives examples of circular solutions in practice. Platforms - often digital - are an important part of the practical implementation of circular economy. This is addressed in module 3 of the course package.

Course content

  • What sustainability means for companies
  • Introduction to the UN's sustainability goals and how to apply these in the company
  • Model for introducing sustainability in the company
  • Opportunities and challenges in sustainability
  • Key regulations related to sustainability
  • Strategy = value creation through competition or collaboration?
  • Perspective on value creation and resource analyzes
  • Classic resource analysis (focus on competition)
  • An introduction to interactive resource analysis
  • Interaction between own business and other organizations
  • Presentation and discussion of joint case analysis
  • Interaction between own business and other organizations
  • Presentation and discussion of joint case analysis
  • Presentation of various platform solutions for circular business models
  • Basic concepts and definitions in sustainability
  • What is in the concept of circular economy, and what challenges is it intended to solve
  • How can one go from linear production to service delivery (servitization)?
  • Presentation of various platform solutions for circular business models

Disclaimer

This is an excerpt from the complete course description for the course. If you are an active student at BI, you can find the complete course descriptions with information on eg. learning goals, learning process, curriculum and exam at portal.bi.no. We reserve the right to make changes to this description.