Education for a Sustainable Future at Aalto Business School (2023)
Image by Mónica Celeste.
Education for a Sustainable Future at Aalto Business School
Roadmap and hackathon design
How to enable Aalto Business School and its stakeholders to cooperate effectively to inform and adapt business school teaching, and to educate leaders/changemakers for a world in a sustainability-transition? By equipping Aalto with the stakeholder insights, collaborative tools and future outlook to realize their commitment to co-creating sustainability solutions with their stakeholders.
Education development and incorporating sustainability topics into education can be considered a wicked problem for several reasons
Universities are complex systems that involve multiple stakeholders, such as professors, faculty members, other university personnel, students, policymakers, and various external stakeholders. Therefore incorporating sustainability topics into education requires a comprehensive understanding of multiple stakeholders - their qualities and needs - and the interactions between them. As different stakeholders may have different perspectives and priorities, incorporating sustainability topics into education requires balancing these diverse perspectives and finding common ground. Furthermore, the business schools have a history of educating leaders for the industry. Now the vision is to educate leaders and game changers in the transformative change. This requires close collaboration with the industry and actors outside the industry to innovate alternative ways of organizing to rethink the way that economics and business is done and taught so we don’t get entangled in the rigid structures of now. Sustainability requires a long-term perspective and commitment, which is why incorporating sustainability topics into education requires a shift in thinking towards a more long-term, systems wide perspective.
The Roadmap Concept
The roadmap is a formulation of pathways which all work towards realizing the common vision. The baseline includes all the materials collected through the stakeholder interviews. These were used to create the framework of the roadmap. The materials provide also probes for the hackathon participants. The actions and solutions form the pathways towards the vision. Actions are steps that should be taken to realize solutions and all the actions include details about resources, stakeholders, challenges and impacts related to them.
We see the roadmap as a formulation of pathways to achieve a set common vision when creating a Roadmap. The vision could be for example: Aalto School of Business as leader in sustainable business education. The baseline includes all the material that we have collected through the interviews. These are used to create the framework of the roadmap. The actions and solutions form the pathways towards the vision. Actions are steps that should be taken to realize solutions and all the actions include details about resources, stakeholders, challenges and impacts related to them. Solutions act as milestones that help to achieve the vision.
The proposal was initially part of a school project at Aalto University in collaboration with Aalto University’s School of Business.
Image by Mónica Celeste