Last month Prof. Oded Lowengart, Dean of the Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management (GGFBM), participated in the AACSB Deans Conference in New Orleans. A member of the The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), the GGFBM had been chosen as one of 35 from 188 institutions across 33 countries to present its winning AACSB Innovations that Inspire project, Developing Social Business Initiatives Within Industrial Firms, which precipitated Dean Prof. Lowengart’s invitation to share the project with hundreds of business school Deans from around the world at this conference.
Prof. Lowengart, photo by Shay Shmueli.
The GGFBM has developed an innovative project through which students engage with business leaders in traditional industrial firms in order to develop sustainable, sophisticated models for social corporate entrepreneurship built into the firms’ core business processes.
In this project, the businesses themselves learn from the students to implement corporate social entrepreneurship that becomes anchored in the core business processes of the firm so that the social business inherently provides added value to its now multiple bottom line: financial, social and environmental.
AACSB held its second annual Innovations That Inspire initiative, recognizing business schools educating management practice toward proactive improvement enhancement of community and society.
A nonprofit membership organization founded in 1916, AACSB International provides quality assurance of business school programs in over 90 countries and territories. With the belief that society and global prosperity benefit from business and business schools, AACSB is well positioned to imbue prime values such as quality, inclusion and diversity, a global mindset, ethics, social responsibility, and community.
Prof. Lowengart sums up, “While this project is one of 35 chosen by AACSB from 188 institutions across 33 countries, it is also one among dozens of similar singular programs at the Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management promoting sustainable management with unequivocal social-community commitment. These are unquestionably an integral component of our curriculum. We are very proud of our capstone courses and programs engaging students with industry and community, and very proud indeed to have at least this one project highlighted at the 2017 Dean’s Conference of AACSB.
