SUSTAINABILITY COURSES AT CBS: CREATING MARKETS FOR SUSTAINABLE PRODUCTS
By Manuel Suter
CBS is becoming more and more popular for students who want to educate themselves in the field of sustainable business. The offered courses of CBS in this field have highly increased over the last few years and give the students a unique opportunity to gain knowledge in this field to get ready for the current and future sustainability challenges. CBS Climate Club will address this topic by sharing experiences of students who are currently attending sustainability courses at CBS. We’ll start the series with Anna who’s visiting the graduate course “Creating Markets for Sustainable Products”.
What is your name, age, nationality, and study program?
I’m Anna, 25 years old and from Germany – specifically from Cologne which is hands down the best city you can live in – apart from Copenhagen of course. Jokes aside, I currently pursue my master’s degree in Supply Chain Management at University of Cologne and had the privilege to come here as part of my Erasmus Exchange. One of the courses I selected here is “Creating Markets for Sustainable Products” which can be taken as part of the minor in Sustainable Business or separately.
What is the course about?
Despite its “creating market” indication, the course is only very roughly concerned with marketing or business development in general. Embedded in sociology, it provides an overview of how markets are constructed on a very macro-level equipping us with a set of skills in humanities to frame and describe a market from a completely distinctive perspective that we are used to. The link to sustainability is established by literature selection (e.g. case study about Oatly) or by in-class exercises in which we analyze concrete problems that companies face developing sustainable goods. In the final paper, we are expected to investigate a case, in which a firm operating in sustainable business is facing a specific controversy, may it stem from external market forces, e.g. consumer hesitation to adapt certain products, or company-specific, e.g. bad press, controversial selling proposal etc.
Why did you choose this course?
One of the key challenges in Supply Chain Management is sustainability. As my home university does not offer a lot of courses in that area, I took the opportunity and elected several sustainability-related courses here at CBS. I was particularly intrigued by this course as it provides me with a very general understanding of the interplay between markets and sustainability.
Whom would you recommend this course?
An interest in sustainability is probably self-explanatory. An interest in sociology may be a plus. If you want a change in perspective, challenge your “thinking-as-usual” and are up for rather intensive readings, this course may be something for you (not negatively connoted, the literature is in 80% of the cases very interesting and both course coordinators, Trine and José, spend a lot of time explaining the content of the papers in class).
What are your key takeaways of the course so far?
What I really like about this course is that it contests our internalized “business-like” approach to cases and problems. Instead of asking for numbers, figures and break-evens, this course is rather about describing and externalizing perceptions and underlying market mechanism that we take for granted and would never really questions as a consumer.
Concepts like
qualification of goods: How are sustainability features actually ascribed to a product?
valuation of goods: How do we measure/rate products and set them apart to each other? or
devices of market: how does shopping behavior change, e.g. in a zero-waste shop as common devices just as shopping carts are eliminated?
How are you hoping to use the knowledge you acquire in this course for future studies or work?
In general, I feel like it fosters my critical thinking ability as I was and probably still am quite stuck in my business bubble with all the focus on value streams and generic frameworks. I hope that this course equips me with the skill to take a step back and frame problems from more multi-facetted perspectives. Specifically, I do not think that this course is very applicable in the Supply Chain Management area, but especially for people in the start-up industry with a sustainability focus this course provides a lot of benefits.