The Business Ethics Center, with faculty of the John Molson School of Business, Concordia University, Montreal and the Smeal College of Business, Pennsylvania State University are jointly developing a research project entitled “Value Creation for a Sustainable World”.
The departure point of the project is that the ecological, social, and technological challenges of the Anthropocene require developing and implementing new economic and business models to create sustainable value for a wide range of stakeholders, including nature, society, and future generations. We define “sustainable value creation” as bringing forth products, services, organizational forms, processes, actions and policies which satisfy real social needs and contribute to the ecological regeneration of nature.
The project will collect and analyze innovative economic and business models of sustainable value creation globally (in the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia) and critically examine mainstream models of business and financial value creation. In reviewing both traditional and sustainability-oriented models, we will focus on both the challenges and opportunities inherent in a possible shift from models based on singlestakeholder wealth creation (e.g. the predominant doctrine of shareholder value maximization) to models that propagate multidimensional value creation. The main goal of the project is to explore the new principles and methods of management for sustainable value creation and to show the applicability of these models in a variety of socio-ecological settings.
The project will pay special attention to potential methods and mechanisms which enable the co-creation and sharing of academic knowledge in cooperation with activist citizens, non-governmental organizations, and social movements. This will be accomplished, for example, by collaborating with participants of local initiatives and striving to create an equitable and sustainable Earth through elaborating and scaling up local solutions that aim to tackle climate-change-related global challenges.
The project will engage academics, and business and civil society practitioners to present and discuss their innovative value creation models for a sustainable world. Interdisciplinary and intercultural exchange will be facilitated to inspire and cross-fertilize different knowledge and action fields as well as to promote intergenerational dialogue about the prospects of the Human-Earth system.