Innovation for Sustainable Futures

Introduksjon

Innovation for Sustainable Futures is a practice-oriented course that provides a strategic and interdisciplinary overview of the evolving roles of creativity, innovation, change, and sustainability, four essential pillars increasingly shaping the future of business and society. The course explores innovation not only as a driver of economic competitiveness, but as a transformative force for addressing complex societal and environmental challenges. The course will deal with two main questions: What defines effective processes of creativity and sustainable innovation within organizations? And what can leaders, professionals, employees, and organizations in general actively enable and accelerate these processes both inside and across organizational boundaries? Throughout the course, students will engage with real-life case studies, collaborative problem-solving exercises, and tools commonly used in the consulting world. They will critically examine internal and external barriers to innovation and develop the skills to foster cultures of creativity, resilience, and change. In doing so, they will be equipped to guide organizations through transformative innovation journeys that respond to the urgent needs of today’s world and shape more sustainable, just, and thriving futures.

Kursets innhold

• Kick-off Workshop: Prototyping Possible Futures (Outdoor or On-Campus)
  This opening workshop may take place outdoors, weather permitting, or within BI’s learning spaces, and is designed to activate students’ creativity, collaboration, and systemic thinking from the very beginning of the course. Working in small teams, students engage with a set of exploratory prompts and future-oriented questions related to management, leadership, and organizational challenges. Through an experiential and reflective process, they are invited to work with tangible and symbolic materials, draw inspiration from their surroundings, and collaboratively create visual or conceptual representations that help them make sense of complex issues. Rather than focusing on predefined solutions, the workshop emphasizes sensemaking, interpretation, and dialogue, encouraging students to surface assumptions, explore multiple perspectives, and reflect on how meaning, values, and context shape managerial action. The activity introduces key course themes - such as purpose-driven innovation, sustainability, systems thinking, and leadership for emergence - through an embodied and participatory learning experience. The workshop sets the tone for the course by fostering openness, curiosity, and shared exploration, establishing a foundation for a transformative and engaged learning journey.
• Course Introduction
  In this opening session, students will be introduced to the course objectives, learning path, and central questions. The session will emphasize how creativity and innovation act as powerful tools to address business challenges, outpace competitors, and shape future-ready organizations.
• Unleashing Creativity: Processes and Practices
  This session explores the anatomy of creative processes within organizations. Through the case of Cirque du Soleil, students will analyse how creativity is structured and sustained in high-performance environments, and reflect on the tension between control and flexibility in fostering innovation.
• Organizational Culture as Catalyst
  Organizational culture can either drive or block innovation. Using the “Cultures at Work: The Case of Home Care Service,” students will investigate how cultural dynamics influence a firm’s innovation capacity and how leaders can build cultures that support experimentation, accountability, and growth.
• People, Teams & Creative Energy
  This session focuses on individual and team-based creativity. Students will examine how diversity of thought, psychological safety, and design thinking contribute to high-impact collaboration and innovative outcomes in business teams.
• Innovation: From Incremental to Transformative
  Students will explore the spectrum of innovation types (incremental, disruptive, and radical) and their strategic implications. Through a comparative study of Airbnb vs. traditional hotels, students will analyze the strategic implications of different innovation types and their impact on industry dynamics.
• Leading Innovation in Complex Environments
  What does it take to lead innovation in fast-moving, high-stakes contexts? This session explores leadership approaches that foster innovation readiness, unlock collective intelligence, and support breakthrough thinking in organizations aiming to stay ahead of the curve.
• Designing for Innovation: Structures that Enable Change
  Students will examine how different organizational structures and governance models can enable or block innovation. Case discussions will address decentralization, agile teams, and fluid boundaries that support learning and creative adaptability.
• Navigating Complexity: From Silos to Systems
  This session introduces tools for understanding complexity in business environments. Students will analyze how unconventional ideas emerge and take root, and how firms can position themselves to lead rather than follow market transformations.
• Communicating Change: Stories that Shape Action
  How is innovation communicated? And how can communication enable or sabotage transformation? Students will explore the narrative, emotional, and strategic aspects of communication in times of change.
• Sustainable Innovation and Systems Thinking
  This session introduces systems thinking and its application to sustainable innovation. Students will learn how to view organizations as interconnected systems and explore how this perspective can inform innovative practices across organizational boundaries.
• Creative Workspace: Designing Environments for Innovation
  Space matters. This session explores how the physical and symbolic design of workspaces can stimulate (or stifle) creativity. Students will reflect on real-world examples and examine how space intersects with culture, well-being, and innovation.
• Innovation Ecosystems: Collaboration Beyond the Firm
  Focusing on innovation networks and ecosystems, this session investigates how cross-sector collaboration drives sustainable value creation. Students will examine how actors can co-create, adapt, and scale innovation in fluid, interdependent systems.
• Project Lab & Final Reflections
  In this capstone session, students will work on their group projects, applying the full arc of the course. The session will include peer feedback, a Q&A to clarify concepts before final assessments.

Forbehold

Dette er et utdrag fra den komplette kursbeskrivelsen for kurset. Dersom du er aktiv student på BI, kan du finne de komplette kursbeskrivelsene med informasjon om bl.a. læringsmål, læreprosess, pensum og eksamen på portal.bi.no. Vi tar forbehold om endringer i denne beskrivelsen.