INN3024 Sustainable Business Model Innovation

    • Number of credits
      7,5
    • Teaching semester
      2025 Spring
    • Language of instruction
      English
    • Campus
      Lillehammer
    • Required prerequisite knowledge

      None

Course content

Contemporary business organizations face the dual expectations of being profitable while at the same time being responsible. Achieving sustainable performance is challenging from an organizational point of view, and it implies aligning or balancing the pursuit of profitability with social and environmental goal attainment.

Business organizations are based either explicitly or implicitly on a business model. The business model specifies how the company creates, delivers and captures value. The purpose of this course is to illuminate how business organizations can design sustainable business models, i.e. business models that align and integrate the company’s economic, social and environmental goal attainment in its strategy and core activities. This implies enhancing the company’s positive externalities and minimizing its negative externalities, in a way that enhances the perceived value of the company’s offerings to customers and other key stakeholders. Thus, firms may enhance financial performance while creating value for a broader set of stakeholders.

The course aims to equip students with the ability to design and innovate sustainable strategies and business models. The course builds on analyses of business models and corporate responsibility by means of case studies of Norwegian and international companies. The course sheds light on the design and innovation of responsible business models. The relationship between responsibility and profitability has traditionally been viewed as a “trade-off”. This course aims to equip students with an understanding of how companies can move beyond this trade-off by designing sustainable business models that align financial, social and environmental performance.

Learning Outcome

Upon successful completion of the course, the student will have achieved the following learning outcomes: 

Knowledge

The student

  • has thorough knowledge of a set of concepts, theories and frameworks about business models and corporate responsibility and the relationship between them
  • has in depht understanding of trade-offs between responsibility and profitability, as well as situations wherein the two objectives can be aligned
Skills

The student

  • can analyze business organizations from the perspectives of business model design and corporate responsibility
  • can use relevant frameworks to understand central mechanisms and practices that promote or hinder financial, social and environmental goal attainment
  • can recognize issues that constitute responsibility-related problems for business organizations, and how they relate to stakeholder interests
  • can recognize factors that promote the need for business model innovation, and the mechanisms associated with such innovations
General competence

The student

  • can analyze relevant academic and practical/professional problems related to responsibility and profitability
  • can identify and manage issues where profitability and responsibility are at stake
  • can apply his/her knowledge and skills in new areas in order to carry out advanced assignments and projects
Teaching and working methods

The following teaching methods are used:

  • Lectures
  • Problem solving exercises
  • Individual and/or group work
  • Self-study

The teaching activities at the meetings are aligned with the expectation that students have prepared for the relevant meeting by reading and other self-learning activities, including written work (see coursework requirements). Expected total work effort in the course is 187.5-225 hours (according to ECTS standard).

Required coursework
  • Mandatory homework assignments must be handed in before each teaching module (a total of 4). Two will be individual, and two will be in groups (in groups of up to three students). Three out of four homework assignments must be passed to be allowed to take the exam. The students themselves are responsible for forming groups.
  • Attendance on at least 50 % of the courses lectured teaching.
Form of assessment

Two days individual home exam. The exam must be written in English.

Assessments
Form of assessmentGrading scaleGroupingDuration of assessmentSupport materialsProportionComment
Home exam
ECTS - A-F
Individual
2 Day(s)
  • All
100
Professional overlap
NameCreditsDateComment
KBA3003 Bærekraftig forretningsmodellinnovasjon
7,5
Faculty
Inland School of Business and Social Sciences
Department
Department of Organisation, Leadership and Management