Business in Society (2235.YR.015611.1)
General information
Type: |
OBL |
Curs: |
1 |
Period: |
S semester |
ECTS Credits: |
4 ECTS |
Teaching Staff:
| Group |
Teacher |
Department |
Language |
| Year 1 |
Maja Tampe |
Ciencias Sociales |
ENG |
COURSE CONTRIBUTION TO PROGRAM
Organizations of all kinds are faced with the challenge of environmental and social sustainability, often urged on by consumers, regulators, investors, and other stakeholders. Firms in particular find it necessary to rethink their relations with society. These trends toward sustainability present both opportunities and risks for firms. For some, this shift offers possibilities for new products and services, for reinventing old ones, for solving problems in new ways, and for reaping economic and reputation benefits from pursuing Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategies. Others, however, face real struggles with far from obvious solutions.
As these challenges of sustainability and stakeholder relations are increasingly central to business strategy, professionals in business analytics have a key role to play given that progress on sustainability is often founded on making sense of complex and big data. The BiS course analyzes where business analytics fits in this task of translating real-world challenges into future business opportunities and of creating the change needed, at the pace needed, for a sustainable world
Course Learning Objectives
The principal goal of this course is to equip you with the concepts, frameworks and tools needed to effectively manage the challenge of sustainability in your future career. Specifically, the course pursues three overarching learning objectives:
1) To assess strategies for sustainable business. We evaluate the business case for sustainability, both in the opportunities it presents and in its uncertainties and limitations. We also explore organizational hurdles to sustainability strategies and ways to overcome them.
2) To develop your systems and critical thinking. We examine root and symptomatic causes of sustainability issues and as well as the drivers of sustainability issues and how they interact.
3) To equip you with tools and frameworks to decide a course on action on sustainability decisions and on ethical dilemmas and to meaningfully reflect on your own choices, as a manager and entrepreneur in your future career and as a citizen.
Methodology
This course is organized as a participative and reflective experience, weaving theory, living cases, assignments, guest speakers, and a team project experience. What do we mean by participative? We expect your active participation in class, whether we discuss cases, role play in simulations, explore the implications of concepts, or interact with a guest speaker. Your active participation serves several purposes. First, it will support your own learning through being able to summarize and explain ideas, to formulate good questions, and to develop and possibly defend your own argument. Second, your active participation will enrich the classroom, making it dynamic and supporting everyone's learning. Third, and as we explain below, your classroom participation is an integral part of the assessment for the course. Overall, we look for you to engage reflectively with the ideas, materials, and your classmates in a safe learning environment; we do not look for a count of comments. What do we mean by reflective? By reflection, we mean a practice where you consider what the ideas and concepts mean to you. In this course, you get exposed to new concepts that do not necessarily have right-or-wrong answers. To make sense of them, it is crucial to draw out underlying assumptions and explore mental models in order to create and develop your own perspective on what these concepts mean in practice, and how they matter to you.
Assessment criteria
Classroom/written participation: 30%
Individual assignments: 35%
Group assignment/final presentation: 35%
Your active participation - in the discussion in class and through written contributions prior to class - is integral to the design of this course. We expect you to be fully prepared, and to have read the cases and assigned readings and to actively participate in the discussion.
Timetable and sections
| Group |
Teacher |
Department |
| Year 1 |
Maja Tampe |
Ciencias Sociales |
Timetable Year 1
Monday2023/10/9:
From 14:15 to 15:45.
From 16:00 to 17:30.
From 2023/10/17 to 2023/12/12:
Each Tuesday from 15:30 to 17:00.
Each Tuesday from 17:15 to 18:45.
