2020, Fuduric, Nikolina

Sustainability topics are wicked problems: Complicated and inter-disciplinary in nature. For education and for lasting societal impact, the challenge is bridging what we know (theory) into what we can do (practice). Sustainable marketing, in particular, has this dilemma. Its theories are complex and its practice is missing a coherent, inter-disciplinary view and is amputated from “normal” marketing. This prevents the scalability of sustainable marketing action, which has influence on important societal dimensions like human health & dignity, the environment, sustainable profit and employment. The duty of marketing educators and practitioners is to stop this fragmentation so that sustainable marketing education can be demystified, structured and then scaled. A way to do that is to employ tools like models or frameworks. One such framework, The Sustainable Marketing Canvas, is briefly introduced as an example. Thereafter, the workshop participants will be encouraged, in the form of an interactive design-thinking process, to create sustainability sense-making tools for their students in their disciplines. At the end of the design sprints, each group will present their tool and pitch its usefulness to the group. The plenum will give feedback to each groups’ presented tools. In this workshop, we will seed our creativity through interdisciplinary perspectives with the goal of creating useful, scalable tools for sustainable education.

2020, Fuduric, Nikolina

For education and for lasting societal impact, the challenge is bridging what we know (theory) into what we can do (practice). In the college of business, marketing as a discipline has the same problem. Marketing’s reach has influence on very important societal dimensions: human health/dignity and environmental considerations to name a few. However, the way we practice sustainable marketing is fragmented and missing an interdisciplinary viewpoint. This acts as a barrier for theoretical development, for educating students, and for coherent, sustainable action. This workshop suggests that sense-making models and frameworks can simplify the complexity of sustainability questions in any discipline and at the same time provide an interdisciplinary view. Using the notion of a canvas, the Sustainable Marketing Canvas is shown as an example of how marketing and sustainability factors are merged to create a decision-making tool. After briefly introducing the development of the Sustainable Marketing Canvas, participants from different disciplines will be encouraged, in the form of an interactive design-thinking workshop, to create sense-making or decision-making tools for their students. At the end of the design sprints, each group will present their tool and pitch the tool’s usefulness to the group. The plenum will give feedback to each group as to the strengths and weaknesses of the presented tools. The goal is not to develop tools that can be used right away. Instead, the goal is to expand participants perception of how sustainability topics can be fused into their disciplines.