What you will study
This Continuing Professional Development (CPD) course is comprised of eight units:
Unit 1
You'll begin by exploring what sustainable business is, how it functions and why it is vital to help enable desirable futures. You will examine why sustainable business is an effective way to contribute towards addressing our collective grand challenges and wicked problems. Finally, you will see how sustainable business can drive impact at the overall ecosystem level to help leave the world a better place than we found it.
Unit 2
In this unit, you'll identify how sustainable business opportunities drive positive changes and how to engage different stakeholders along a common sustainable vision and mission. You'll learn how to implement sustainable business in practice with inspirational cases and practical guidance on engaging divergent stakeholders while understanding the key needs and problems across stakeholder ecosystems to frame business opportunity spaces.
Unit 3
You'll address complex challenges and issues within multi-stakeholder settings with often divergent perspectives. You'll examine how to get started and what steps you should take to frame a specific challenge and solve it. You will learn how to create, map and analyse problems across stakeholders using systems thinking, to understand complex dynamics and their interrelatedness across your chosen challenge space.
Unit 4
This unit picks up threads from the three preceding units and moves on to building a systems map related to your challenge space. You'll decide what to include and exclude from your map given the underlying complexities of your stakeholder ecosystem and decide where you might need to intervene within your system.
Unit 5
You'll dive into the process of creative thinking to solve systemic challenges. You'll also learn how to generate a range of ideas to address your defined sustainability issues.
Unit 6
In the previous units you will have considered a wide range of creative ideation techniques to address your sustainability challenge space. You'll now use converging thinking to make decisions about which ideas to take forward and which to leave behind.
Unit 7
You'll discover how to articulate and prototype the underlying value you intend to generate across your ecosystem stakeholders. More specifically, you will understand how your intended business concept delivers value to solve the needs, problems and issues you identified early within your systems map.
Unit 8
In this final unit, it’s time to draw together the threads of your learning and focus on how you will use that learning to select the most important and critical elements to test using quick validation cycles with your key ecosystem stakeholders. You'll also learn how to put together an effective pitch to potential seed or angel investors.
Please note: some course materials are used in 'Sustainability for Business Success’, a course developed by The Open University and available on the Coursera platform. Consequently, we advise against enrolling on both.
You will learn
By the end of this CPD course, you’ll learn how to:
- understand underlying mega-trends and drivers influencing the general shift and change in consumer preference and business landscapes towards sustainable impact outcomes
- frame and scope new business challenges, strategically grounded in contributing to UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s)
- go beyond the limitations of existing methodologies and business design approaches like Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Business Model Innovation to serve complex ecosystem needs and problems.
- design and implement new sustainable business concepts and business models grounded in People, Planet, Profit and Progress centric thinking and doing
- identify and articulate value types across the sustainable business design and innovation processes
- take a critical, self-reflective perspective whilst implementing new sustainable business with industry leading tools and methodologies
- synthesize divergent needs and conflicting interests across multi-stakeholder ecosystems and value chains as you validate your new business ideas through go-to-market testing cycles
- design experiments to validate sustainable business concepts and supporting business models across a vast array of ecosystem stakeholders to ensure delivery of reciprocating value.
Learner support
Expert, confidential learner support is available when you need it from a learning adviser, who will respond to you directly. Other support is available via the course forum, dedicated website and computing helpdesk.
Practice-based assignment
There is a practice-based assignment (PBA) which you complete at the end of the course to demonstrate how you have applied, or are intending to apply, the theories and models you have learnt. Once completed and successfully passed you will receive a digital badge and a course completion certificate which you can download as a record of your learning.