Partnership for Sustainability: A Case Study of BAZ County

Management Dynamics in the Knowledge Economy, 2017

Sustainable development is a global objective to overcome the economic, environment and society crises worldwide. The research aims are twofold: (i) Explores the proactive and dynamic model of the university's education system, focusing on the new role played by the School of Economics in the promotion of economic, social and environmental sustainability, and how this goes beyond, in stimulating bottom-up social entrepreneurship ideas through students engagement; (ii) Provides a descriptive analysis of innovative laboratories modules, by studying and mapping the best project proposals initiated by the student. Finally, it presents a case study analysis on waste management (UniRecycling) project, scaling up objectives, stakeholder mapping, activities and the expected results. The findings show the new role played by School of Economics, along with other partner institutions, in supporting the student's engagement in practice-oriented workshops that enable the transfer of knowledge, skills, and self-development. The implications of the research to be developed show that a dynamic bottom-up model of learning and dissemination of sustainable and entrepreneurial should aim to sensitise students to be active and create project ideas for social and environmental entrepreneurship and build and strengthen the local territorial networks, to contribute to the creation of a system of services attentive to responsible and sustainable entrepreneurial development.

The Professional Communication Unit (PCU) at the University of Cape Town (UCT) has developed innovative, multimodal teaching approaches that aim to contribute to the notion of corporate citizenship. Two separate course partnerships strive to equip senior commerce students with graduate attributes valued in business and government. Course one involves a partnership with environmental consultants who collaborate with staff to mentor students during their institutional investigation of sustainable business practices. Course two involves collaboration between students, staff and small business owner-managers. It focuses on sustainability practices of the chosen SME in relation to the triple bottom line. The model aims to prepare students for societal challenges in the workplace and to offer technical support to these SMEs to increase their competitiveness. In the wake of global financial and environmental crises, this article amplifies the need for collaborative partnering as all constituents aim to remain relevant and sustainable in the 21st century.

Manual for establishment of an innovative partnership network for sustainable development university – business, 2015

A functioning network for co-operation between university and business ensures a number of benefits for the universities and students. Such benefits are, namely, various benefits for the business and branch organizations, benefits for the economic development and management in a regional plan, solutions of social issues of public significance, etc. The developed model for sustainable co-operation between university and business is based on the analysis of good innovative practices in the sphere of building and functioning of partnership networks university – business, supporting the students, social inclusion. For this purpose, leading higher educational institutions in the country and abroad, that have established a good co-operation practices with the business community, including the promotion of university – business co-operation modules, were analyzed. Subject of this analysis was the readiness of business and branch organizations in the country to join a system for co-operation between the university and business, as well as students` attitudes and willingness to present data to be entered in the indicated system. Of significant importance for the system model structuring was also the attitudinal research of the lecturers at University of Economics - Varna regarding the necessity of an innovative university – business partnership network and their willingness to participate in it.

The Methodist University of São Paulo, a confessional institution with three campuses in São Bernardo do Campo, in the São Paulo Metropolitan Region, which has 1,600 employees and 25,000 undergraduate students and postgraduate students, adopted in 2008 Sustainability as a transversal theme in its Institutional Educational Project. In 2009, started the Methodist Sustainable Program with the goal to mainstream sustainability in all undergraduate programs, in a co-creative process that included staff, professors and directors. Theory U and other similar methodologies were used in order to connect with new perspectives and attitudes that could arouse a co-creation field and a process able to reveal the connections of all expertises and knowledge produced with the sustainability area. The expectation is that this methodology continues to expand, involving university sectors and participants and oriented by educational purposes, research and community outreach. The expansion of the program led to the development of Actions Research Projects as reported in the present work, designed to consolidate a network of regional solidarity economy. The experiment enrolled 12 professors and lecturers, 20 students and 11 social enterprises linked with Solidarity Economy Network of the populous neighborhood of Montanhão in São Bernardo do Campo, Brazil. The development of the project and the results accomplished created concrete actions of the University that benefit peripheral areas of the Metropolitan Region of São Paulo and could be used for promoting emergence and organization of individual and collective enterprises in other six nearby cities, that together with São Bernardo do Campo forms the Great ABC region, home to 2,500,000 inhabitants. Collective training of entrepreneurs in technology, human reasoning and political citizenship in the urban world were the axis of project. The results obtained can engage other groups and nearby cities, strengthening the social consciousness and regional identity.

The main ambition of the paper is to familiarise the public with the objectives of the KEGA project No. 037STU - 4/2012 Implementation of the “Sustainable Corporate Social Responsibility” subject into the study programme of Industrial Management in the second degree of study at STU MTF Trnava ,and to introduce the Faculty of Materials Science in Trnava , Institute of Industrial Engineering and Management as a predictor of the sustainable corporate social responsibility concept in university education and its application in industrial companies in Slovakia

The objective of this article was to understand the sense of developing a business which incorporates sustainability principles, and debating the role of the university in fostering socio-environmental practices among the new generation of entrepreneurs, with a focus on Brazilian experiences. The intention was to fill a gap in the literature, which focuses its efforts on the analysis of the education for sustainability in formal business courses and not on the incubation spaces at universities. This qualitative research investigated companies in incubator programs at four Brazilian university business incubators regarding the attention to the way the business project is selected in the incubators; the sources and nature of the incubators' socio-environmental concerns, the meaning of sustainability for these entrepreneurs, the way they put these principles into action in their business plans, the difficulties and challenges they face in meeting socio-environmental goals in their companies, and the inductor incubator's role in fostering sustainable businesses. The results shows that the actions of these young entrepreneurs externalize, more than anything, a concern with developing products and services which reduce environmental damage. Despite this being a laudable effort, it gives little indication that this generation of entrepreneurs is reviewing traditional management presuppositions or proposing new business formats regarding sustainability. Beyond this, the results also show that the investment in education for sustainability at university incubators seemed to be almost nonexistent, which has consequences for generations of born and raised companies in this academic environment.

2015

Management of Sustainable Development, 2014

The issue of sustainable development (SD) is increasingly present among the concerns of the international academic community. However, the depth of our unsustainable practices suggests that insufficient progress has been made to move from an unsustainable lifestyle to sustainable development. By sharing ideas, concepts, tools, experiences learned in different contexts, it is anticipated that we will all learn many things that will help us to help our academic communities and companies to develop the skills to make progress towards sustainable development. In response to increasing concerns of society about environmental degradation and increasing demands for a transition to a more sustainable society, the business companies are increasingly active in aligning their processes and services with a sustainability agenda. A good management of environmental services has now become the focus of many business strategies tending to the aspiration of ‘greening’ their infrastructures and produ...

IOP Conf. Series: Earth and Environmental Science, 2018

Sustainable development is a worldwide recognized social and political goal; it is discussed both in academic and political discourse. According to the authors, the formation of a new way of thinking will help to achieve this goal. A lot of research is related to sustainable development in higher education. However, mental models are formed even more effectively at school age. The paper was written in the context of Russia, where the subject of sustainable development in education is extremely poorly developed. The case of Ural Federal University was presented. The University has been working for several years on the creation of a device for the purification of sewage industrial water in the framework of an initiative student group. Recently, schoolchildren have joined this work. Such projects have been called university-to-school projects. Successful solution of inventive tasks contributes to the formation of mental models. The case has been analyzed in terms of institutionalism. The authors argued the primacy of mental institutions over normative in the process of sustainable society construction.