Profugo Blogs

This morning, MIT posted a new course on their OpenCourseWare site, “15.992 S-Lab: Laboratory for Sustainable Business.”  This course was offered “live” at MIT’s Sloan School of Management in Spring 2008.

For those of you not familiar with OpenCourseWare, MIT has made many of their courses available free on the web — some have video content, others are simply slides from class presentations (but you still can’t beat the price!)

This course looks largely project based — alas, you’ll miss out on that, but it might provide some interesting foundations or case studies for those of you interested.

The course introduction, quoted from their website:

How can we translate real-world challenges into future business opportunities? How can individuals, organizations, and society learn and undergo change at the pace needed to stave off worsening problems? Today, organizations of all kinds—traditional manufacturing firms, those that extract resources, a huge variety of new start-ups, services, non-profits, and governmental organizations of all types, among many others—are tackling these very questions. For some, the massive challenges of moving towards sustainability offer real opportunities—opportunities for new products and services, for reinventing old ones, or for solving problems in new ways. Other organizations tackling sustainability are engaged in very real struggles in which the solutions are far from obvious. Alongside our questions about the problems of sustainability and how to reconcile free-market capitalism with the need for more sustainable business practices are real questions about how to move along the path towards sustainability.

This course seeks to address these questions by providing students with:

1. in-depth knowledge of the various sustainability issues we face today;
2. a set of analytical tools and frameworks that will help you understand/analyze as well as impact these issues; and
3. experience working with a firm or organization currently developing new business models (or reforming existing ones) in line with sustainable development.

The course aims to provide participants with access and in-depth exposure to firms that are actively grappling with the sustainability-related issues through cases, readings and guest speakers.

Given the enormous challenges we face as a society and as a species, this course is focused around the question “what can companies do?” Our hope is to explore the wide variety of ways in which commercial firms are already responding to problems like global climate change, environmental degradation and social dislocation in order to support you in crafting a response that is committed both to the reality of “the bottom line” and to the need to sustain the natural and human systems on which we all rely. The course will be taught through a mixture of case studies, readings, class discussion and class visitors. A particularly important feature is the term project — a “live” project during which participants will work in groups of three to four people with an organization that has requested the Sloan School’s help in thinking through an issue related to sustainability. Prior projects have included work with large companies like Disney, Intel and Nike, smaller companies like Good Energies, GoLoCo and Green Fuel Technologies and NGOs like MiBanco.