Design for Sustainable Value

Catalog description

The relationship between business and society--and the search for mutually beneficial advances between industry and the world's most pressing global issues--has become one of the defining issues of the 21st century. Throughout the world, immense entrepreneurial energy is finding expression, energy whose converging force is in direct proportion to the turbulence, crises, and the call of our times. Factories and buildings are being designed in ways that, surprisingly, give back more clean energy to the world than they use. Bottom-of-the-pyramid strategies and micro-enterprise models are demonstrating how business can eradicate poverty through profitability. Companies are designing products that leave behind no waste--only "food" that becomes input into their biological or technological cycles. And macrowikinomics--everything from telepresence to megacommunity--is rebooting our capacity for human cooperation and global action. Prereq: Limited to ORBH PhD students only.