Conscious Business Syllabus

Many of the challenges Europe faces require businesses or support from businesses to create innovative solutions. Businesses created innovation, jobs, and wealth, and yet they equally cause, or si...

We wanted to achieve the following 4 objectives by implementing the project Create & share business courses which describe conscious business practices at bachelor-, graduate- & executive education Explore, describe & teach innovative conscious pedagogic methods that support our conscious business courses Adapt our academic courses to executive training on conscious business Ultimately, we wanted to contribute to the transformation of European businesses to conduct business more consciously More specifically, our Conscious Business Curriculum was to innovate ‘traditional’ business courses in 4 ways. Embed ethics and ethical dilemmas in our course to emphasize the relevance of ethical behavior, inclusion, and diversity. Secondly, to teach leaders that they need to serve people & planet, to become more system-oriented, ethical, inclusive, and conscious about the impact of their decisions and actions. Thirdly, we aimed to emphasize Stakeholder Integration addressing the gain of all other stakeholders, environment, communities, employees, suppliers, and society at large. As a fourth aim, we described companies as purpose driven, addressing real societal needs while making profit.

We implemented the following activities in our project, grouped in 7 main blocks. The first block consisted in validating the requirements from businesses for conscious business practices. What conscious business practices do they consider critical for their future success, which conscious business skills and tools do we need to teach future business students to better prepare them for a conscious economy. We designed a survey and reached out to 25.000 companies through our project partner PIMEC, which represents small and medium companies in Catalunya. We received 272 answers, from which we extracted insights into what companies anticipate to need from future university hires. Those requirements guided us to identify and prioritize which conscious business courses to create. We compared those requirements (aka ‘demand’ for conscious business education) with the teaching and research history of the participating 12 professors from the 6 project partner universities (aka ‘supply’ of conscious business education). This led to the identification of 21 conscious business courses, covering bachelor and graduate level. Once we had identified which 21 courses we wanted to offer, we created a concise plan as the second main activity. The plan consisted of precising the learning objectives of each course, identifying the necessary steps to create the courses, identifying and inviting peer reviewers, which led to the definition of milestones for each course and an overall course-creation timeline. We had planned the course creation phase to take up to 9 months and committed ourselves to make the courses material available to 80% readiness by the first Multiplier Event in June 2023 in Barcelona. The biggest single effort of the project was the actual creation of the 21 courses, activity-block 3. It activities like researching & collecting available data, researching literature as well as identifying and collecting content from other academic sources and companies/CEOs/thought leaders. Every course creator screened available business cases and relevant practical examples to e included and made a dedicated effort to integrate new research/data/literature. This served as the raw content base. Every course creator then engaged in deliberate design of the course flow & outline, defining a course syllabus. Throughout this process, we regularly coordinated efforts and were able to identify “best practices” among the 12 course creators. We were able to set some common standards to ensure a common methodology across all our courses. Those included common practices on Syllabus, Teaching Notes, Case Studies, Rubrics, key terminology and definitions and even slide layout and design. The creation phase included 2 mandatory peer reviews. One with an internal project peer, a second one with an external-to-project peer to ensure an effective outside-in view on the innovative content. Such feedback was integrated to package & polish the 21 courses. The 4th step consisted in piloting the 21 courses. We used our LTTA event to share and teach the courses to partner professors in order to gain feedback, shared learnings from the creation process and integrate inputs from the LTT participants. In addition to the professional review in the LTT, we piloted the created courses in classrooms before the Multiplier Events. Indeed 16 of the 21 courses were taught at partner universities. This lead to the extraction and description of what we call “conscious spice”, a pedagogic tool box how to teach conscious business courses more consciously. We added the “conscious toolbox” to the conscious business education material we share in Multiplier Events and Web. The next, 5th, block of activities included the sharing, teaching and promotion of our conscious business courses through 4 Multiplier Events. Due to the delayed start of the project we delayed our first in-person multiplier events to June 2023. It was held in Barcelona at the Barcelona School of Mgmt. We attracted not only local audience but many european and international participants, which spoke to our ability to mobilize a pan-european audience. The 4 Multiplier Events, 2 of them in-person, 2 virtual, were successful in pursuing 3-fold objectives. First and foremost to share, teach and promote the usage of Conscious Business Courses across the audience. We therefore repeated this part in every Multiplier Event to promote adoption. Secondly, we used each event to bring like-minded professors, researchers and educators to workshop relevant topics to create new insights and advance our understanding of what conscious business should be taught and how they should be taught. Examples are how to best adopt our courses, which inner development practice an educator should practice to be optimally prepared to teach conscious business, how to coordinate conscious-business-research across participants etc. The third generic objective we emphasized successfully in each event was to create and expand a community of like-minded conscious business educators. In total (excluding participants in multiple events), we reached around 100 people to our events and attracted > 700 users to our LinkedIn community. All our course material is freely available via the web of course. We count on expanding and deepening the community as a hotbed for future adoption, co-creation of further conscious business course content and other related promotional activities. We had always intended to take the academic course material and adapt it to executive education. Once all courses were created, piloted and shared in the first Multiplier Event, we identified the 9 relevant courses for executives to condense them into an executive education pilot. This pilot, named “executive program conscious business bootcamp”, was initiated by one of our partners : Impact Center Erasmus. It was delivered to a carefully selected audience for 2 days in Rotterdam and very well received through the post-program evaluation. We then went further and condensed the 2 days executive program into 5 hours which were delivered to Catalan entrepreneurs through PIMEC in late 2023. Lastly, as the 7th block of activities, we continuously grew a community of like-minded business faculties and professors to create a community of conscious business educators. We are convinced that such a community meets an important need of the many ‘lone’ conscious educators scattered across Europe. More than 700 of them are connected through the Conscious Business LinkedIn community. Some have approached us to contribute incremental content, and in 1 case we finalized a 22nd course on Conscious Contracting, aka “integrative law”. We were able to forge cooperations with european business schools like Politecnico di Milano, Business Ethics Institute at Corvinus University in Budapest and some non-european institutions like Tecnologico de Monterrey in Mexico. This network of like-minded educational institutions and professors we created will be the base upon which we will further expand our efforts to create, share and inspire the teaching of conscious business practices.