 Hello and welcome everyone to MBA 604 Innovation and Sustainability. Today we are moving into Unit 1, Part 1A, and I am Joni Roberts. I am the Vice Program Chair and Consulting Professor for Sailors MBA Program. I am the lead creator of the Innovation and Sustainability course. And I say lead because there are a lot of people that contributed to the success of this course coming together. I am also a Business Professor since 2008 teaching both at the MBA and undergraduate levels. And I've had the opportunity to teach a wide range of topics. And these include international business, global strategy, marketing, sustainability, leadership, and organizational behavior. So currently I am an adjunct professor with Cain University in New Jersey. And I serve on the President's Sustainability Task Force for academics. I'm also the founder of Evolution University and creator of online courses and books for social and environmental sustainability. I got my international MBA from the University of South Carolina. And I have a great love of open water swimming, hiking, and travel with nature immersions. If you'd like to find me on social media, I'll look for the hashtag evolve our world. Right, so this course, we are going to be talking about how businesses and societies are experiencing significant challenges and ensuring that stakeholders, which can be owners, employees, customers, suppliers, community members, peer organizations and other interest groups achieve and maintain well being into an uncertain future. So these challenges can be economic, environmental and social. And they can also be seen as opportunities to achieve and maintain both internal and external success and satisfaction. So sustainability issues like climate change, social equity, biodiversity preservation and poverty elimination are becoming critical with time. And so we need to continuously adopt and apply innovative approaches to effectively address these issues. Some ways of doing this are dematerialization, product stewardship, renewable energy generation, biomimicry and circular economy, which are a few examples of how businesses are turning challenges into opportunities for future well being. So this course identifies a wide range of strategies and illustrates how businesses and other organizations can effectively implement sustainable innovation approaches. Right, the course is developed using open educational resources. So everything I will be sharing with you is in the course can be found in the learning materials, and it's all open educational creative comments licensing material. So I'm not sharing with you my personal material, but that which is in the course. Right, so over this course, you will be able to identify the key components of innovation and sustainability and their connection to one another. You will be able to assess issues related to innovation and sustainability by identifying pros and cons of certain courses of action, and the ethical and values based roots of those issues. You will also be able to analyze cultural, ideological and practical perspectives on innovation and sustainability in ways that individuals, communities and organizations express these perspectives and put them into practice. And you'll also be able to incorporate elements of innovative sustainability to a specific business or sector by developing a hypothetical entrepreneurial startup organization. So our course is designed using learning outcomes at the course level, and then we have unit learning outcomes. So when our talks here will be diving into each of the three units and the corresponding unit learning outcomes. So here we are in unit one definitions and concepts, and we're getting into the first learning outcome today, one a, which is identifying aspects of innovation and products and services combined with social and environmental sustainability. In all, we estimate having 10 recordings with the first eight focusing on the units and the unit learning outcomes. These all follow the study guide provided in the course. The last two recordings will be on case studies and helping you with your exam preparation. So why take the time to talk about the learning outcomes, and why are they important. So, learning outcomes is a way of creating a course that's congruent and meaningful, and every learning outcome aligns to the course material and content, and the assessments are tied to each learning outcome, and they provide focus for test preparation. All right. So let's get started. Unit one is all about going through the definitions and concepts in sustainability and innovation. So let's start with thinking about what is innovation. So innovation implies something new or changed in products, services, ideas or fields. And sustainability implies something that can be maintained at a certain rate or level. Bringing these together with social and environmental sustainability, we can use the definition that is probably the most commonly referenced one, and it was given by the Norwegian Prime Minister, Bro Harlem Bruntland in 1987 in a report, Our Common Future. And she states that sustainability is meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. So how do we bring this into business. So the sustainable business perspective takes into account not only profits and returns on investment, but also how business operations affect the environment, natural resources, and future generations. And so we can think of this as people, planet and profit in balance with one another. And this is referred to as the triple bottom line. All right, next, we need to think about how we can take innovation, creating something new and sustainability, creating something that lasts together in business. So sustainability innovators create new products and services designed to solve the problems created by the collision of economic growth, population growth, and natural systems. They seek integrated solutions that offer financial renumeration ecological system protection and improved human health performance, all of which contribute to community prosperity. Sustainability innovation growing from the early ripples in the 1980s and 90s now constitutes a wave of creativity led by a growing population of entrepreneurial individuals and ventures. And that is why sailor decided to include this course in its MBA program, which is certainly forward thinking. So what we're moving from is the past and we're moving into the future, and the conventional economy is based in traditional business school curricula, and that curricula is changing and needs to change to consider sustainability needs. The conventional economy really was focused on endless growth, extracting natural resources, taking resources, reliance on fossil fuels, causing pollution, and a mindset of one and done and creating waste. So when we think about that for a moment, we can see that these practices are not sustainable. So here we have the entrepreneurial sector coming in and bringing forth ideas like responsible growth, regenerative resources, healthy outcomes and circular ways of making products. All right, so with sustainability innovation this can lead to things you know that we that we see today, and that we are likely to see much more of, and even things that we can't see today that the entrepreneurial sector will be bringing forward. So things like wind turbine technology, fuel cells, hybrid cars, electric vehicles, non toxic materials, organic foods, green building design, and, you know, working towards zero emissions, zero waste, reverse logistics, cradle to cradle design, green chemistry, the function that the product in nature's services. So that's the future. And the future can be one that is much better than the one that we have today. And I believe sustainability is something that is a field that is exciting, and to be part of solutions and a new way of creating products and services that actually really truly do create a better world. So what are some of the benefits of innovation and sustainability, and we can see these examples in the books that came with the course and are identified with this learning unit in your learning materials. So one is reduce costs. And by reducing energy and materials use, you're reducing waste and you're reducing costs so that's a good thing. And Donald, by reducing the packaging with this burgers and french fries actually saves money. And so pursuing sustainability can be something that's a win-win solution. Another one is reducing risk. So by lowering legal risk, you can lower insurance costs. Right now, we know a lot of insurance rates are going up tremendously because of unsustainability. The example given in the book is BP. So had BP invested in the safety features to protect against the environmental disasters, it couldn't have avoided huge liability costs associated with the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010. And that is differentiation strategy. So you can differentiate your products or services and your brand. So companies like Green Mountain Coffee Roasters and Stonyfield Farm have differentiated their brands and increased consumer awareness and sales of products with their focus on sustainability. You can also find new products and markets. So a drive towards innovation to create new products and serve new markets, let a company like 7th generation to develop new product lines to address environmental concerns of households and position themselves as a leader in the sustainable consumer household products category. Alright, since then we've seen a lot more companies join in on that category as well. Another benefit of combining innovation and sustainability is the company image. So you'll have an improvement of the company image and reputation with consumers and particularly the increasing numbers of consumers who are concerned about the environment and their own impact on the environment. It's also a great way to attract and retain employees. So you can increase the number of job applicants and also keep people in your companies longer, especially when they care about the environment and sustainability and the actions of the companies that they are working for. One that is becoming even bigger is the enhancement of investor interest. So increasing numbers of investors taken to consideration companies sustainability practices when making their decisions on where to invest. So companies that act with concern for social and environmental matters operate at lower risk. So growth rates can be positively affected. All right, so let's also take a moment and think about the global commons. And the global commons are, you know, traditionally thought of as the oceans, the atmosphere, Antarctica outer space. They are more thought of along the lines of our interconnectedness and our reliance on the same resources and environmental assets that support the health of the planet. So we're looking at land, forests, freshwater. And, you know, we can look at the Amazon rainforest, other forests, for example, that don't just impact the local area where these forests are located but impact the entire quality of the earth. We all share one planet, we breathe the same air, we drink the same water, and we depend on the same oceans, forests, and biodiversity. So more and more we're seeing ourselves as globally interconnected. So the opposite of sustainability is unsustainability. And the question is, how did we get here. So the traditional mindsets and views and business, you know, had the idea that Earth's resources are limitless. That business decisions do not affect the global commons, and that business is separate from the global commons. The mindset was for a very long time that the solution to pollution is dilution. So if you didn't see it, then it wasn't an issue, it wasn't a problem. And the traditional mindsets were all about today, considering today, you know, the next quarter, the next year, and thinking very short term, driven by profits and financial gains. Those were really powerful mindsets that drove business for quite a long time. They're still lingering, and we're still in transition to sustainability mindsets and sustainability views. And now we know that the earth's resources need to be preserved, and that it's clear that business activities can harm the global comments, and that protecting the global comments requires cooperation from businesses. And we need to not just consider the needs of today, but also the needs of the future and think long term. And to not just focus on profits, but to seek and create value across the triple bottom line of people, planet, and profits all together. All right, in our Unit 1 learning content, we have a tech talk by Naoko Ishii, called an economic case for protecting the planet. And she shares that in her 30 years as a public economist, the notion of the global commons never crossed her mind, or entered in conversations with colleagues. And this is something that we find, you know, leaders saying that for decades, they didn't talk about these things, they didn't worry about these things when doing business. And so, you know, well intentioned people running, running businesses didn't think beyond, you know, the internal aspects of the operations of that business by itself. And now, you know, we know better someone we know better we do better. And she recommends changing for economic systems. Change our cities into green cities. Change our energy system. Change our production consumption system. Change our food system. So that sets the stage for us as we continue in this course. We will explore these and more ideas on how to make changes today that create a better future for all of us. So to review these topics that we covered today, you can see the study guide resources. And I also added an additional resource that you can find in the Learning 1 learning content. All right, thank you very much for being here and I look forward to going through the rest of the learning units and learning unit outcomes with all of you we have a lot ahead of us. And I hope that gives you a very good understanding of what we will be exploring in this course.