Gorgi Krlev wins the 2023 Financial Times Responsible Education Award for Teaching The Assistant Professor of Sustainability was rewarded at the World Economic Forum in Davos for a collaborative online course co-designed by and used at ESCP Business School.

For the second year in a row, the Financial Times showcased the best-in-class teaching materials, academic research and student initiatives that contribute to making education (and business) more responsible.

Among the four winners selected in the award category for teaching cases and pedagogical resources is ESCP Assistant Professor of Sustainability, Gorgi Krlev, for TRANSFORM. The collaborative online course was co-designed by ESCP Business School, the universities of Heidelberg, Mannheim, Sorbonne, Warsaw, and Copenhagen, and initially co-funded by the 4 EU+ University Alliance (through the European Union’s Erasmus+ programme).

Sustainability needs to be the starting point, and everything else should follow (not the other way around)! This is what we promote with our platform.

Gorgi Krlev, Assistant Professor of Sustainability

In the spring of 2022, over 45 students from five universities participated in the 14-week course, which is organised around the modules:

  1. The complexity of sustainability challenges
  2. Open and frugal innovation as a response
  3. Strategy formation for most effective problem-solving
  4. Scaling sustainable solutions
  5. Measuring social impact

To bring the lessons from these modules to life, the students work in teams to create a service, product or process innovation that addresses a sustainability challenge. The best results from these course projects are featured on the TRANSFORM platform.

This is in line with the second mission of TRANSFORM, “to provide an open-source online platform on innovation and (social) entrepreneurship for ecological and social sustainability.” In addition to the course, TRANSFORM provides educators with free access to innovative teaching resources on sustainability.

In the face of climate change, it is our responsibility as a business school and educators to lead the way in rethinking how we educate and how we do business for a more sustainable future.At ESCP, we are proud of our professors who consistently rethink and discover new teaching methods that help prepare our students for the challenges ahead.

Professor Joe Miemczyk, Associate Dean of Sustainability

Professors from across ESCP’s six campuses contribute to a growing body of pedagogical resources that provide our students, partner universities and communities at large with opportunities to expand their knowledge and skills to contribute to sustainable transformation.

For example:

  • Created by Sylvain Bureau, professor of entrepreneurship at the Jean-Baptiste Say Institute of ESCP Business School, as a way to reframe business education, the Art Thinking Method is paving the way for a new, disruptive way of teaching business.
  • Commons for Future, launched in the spring of 2022 by ESCP and the Carbon 4 Academy, is an open-access, digital platform provided under a Creative Commons license which makes available the course materials of Energy, Business, Climate & Geopolitics to all ESCP students and the broader business and academic communities.
  • It can be discouraging when students or executives learn about sustainable visions and approaches in the classroom but find out later on that they cannot put them into practice. That’s why Professor Chuanwen Dong created the Beer Transportation Game. Developed from a real-world business case from Procter&Gamble to decarbonize logistics, the game allows students to roleplay logistics management for a brewer and understand the impact that their decisions would have on logistics costs and emissions.

For more insight into the power of business and education for positive impact, discover ESCP’s collections of Impact Papers.

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