Managing for Tomorrow

 “Managing for Tomorrow: Solving the Sustainability Puzzle” is a short term study program, which was jointly organized by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Gies College of Business, and WU Vienna University of Economics and Business. 

On the basis of insights into current and future challenges affecting businesses around the globe (including climate change, population dynamics, urbanization, inequity, etc.), students learned to analyze their implications on business strategy, management, and other core business functions. Students developed a sense of dealing with trade-offs in global business and learned to understand drivers for change and innovative solutions.

Inspired by lectures, workshops, start-up and business visits in Vienna and Graz, as well as excursions such as to the Raxalpe, international student teams worked on their own sustainability projects under the guidance of their course instructors and sustainability authors, Alice Schmidt and Claudia Winkler.

For their project, each student team chose a company such as the US shoe brand Allbirds, Austrian supermarket Billa or Swiss mining company Glencore, and investigated its strategy and approaches to sustainability, with a focus on the six puzzle pieces (climate action, circular economy, social justice, responsible consumption, sustainable business and technology), as well as proposing strategies to become more sustainable.

The program took place at WU Vienna from May 16-26, 2023 for bachelor-level students from Gies College of Business, from WU Vienna and from selected international partner universities such as Tilburg University.