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The Oregon MBA offers a dedicated concentration in Sustainable Business Practices that builds leaders who know how to balance social, environmental and economic responsibilities. The University of Oregon has a deep tradition for sustainability, based on strong alignment with the Pacific Northwest’s cultural values for the quality of the natural environment, responsible stewardship and equity. Within the business school, a variety of courses have evolved over the past 20 years to produce a focused curriculum that offers students elements of sustainability integrated into traditional MBA coursework and distinctive courses that are highly innovative for MBA programs.
Since its establishment as a new program, the Center for Sustainable Business Practices has continued to foster leading-edge coursework to ensure that it provides its MBA students with the latest and best possible learning environment. In its essence the program has three principle areas of focus:
The University of Oregon has assembled a strong foundation on which to build this leading program.
The Center provides the platform for excellence, bringing together academia and the business community through a leadership based on practitioner expertise. The Center offers the following valuable benefits to students and businesses:
The Lillis Business Complex is one of the most environmentally friendly business schools on one of the nation’s greenest campuses. The UO is one of just 11 schools to earn the highest possible honors from The Princeton Review’s “Green Honor Roll” in 2008.
The University of Oregon has a long-standing sustainability program that addresses all aspects of its campus, from physical assets and infrastructure to program activities. The University's sustainability plans address a multitude of topics:
The University has a multitude of programs that cut across campus, reinforcing the basic values of sustainability on a daily basis. These initiatives have universal support from leadership, faculty, staff and students, and remain a source of identity and pride to the University.
Effective leadership and ethics are two sides of the same coin, whether in business, politics, or your personal affairs. That's why we made this course the culmination of the required core. Regardless of your chosen track, you and all your classmates will come together once more in your last term to take this course.
Each year 2nd year Oregon MBA students have the option of traveling to China to visit with companies in their track of study. The theme of the study tours reflect the missions of the Centers that are participating. In the spring before these trips, students and faculty participate in a weekly seminar. During the past year the topics addressed the development of markets and economies in China, history, language and philosophy, considerations of market entry, and cross-cultural management. This course marshals the diverse and diffuse scholarly and pedagogical resources of the University of Oregon by tapping the expertise of East Asian specialists in the humanities and social sciences, and using that knowledge to illuminate the practical challenge of doing business in China. It provides the students with the basic cultural, historical, linguistic, and societal background and understanding necessary to navigate the terrain of a very foreign business, labor, and political environment, thus bridging the educational gap that commonly separates the liberal arts from business training.
This class is the second part of a two-part class begun this year at the SOJC. The two classes are designed to increase students' knowledge and understanding of issues and theories in green communication. In the first class, you were exposed to a range of thinking from many different disciplines about sustainability. In this class, you will focus on a specific communication problem and develop a leadership position in the conversation in that area. The goals of this class are:
- to understand the intersection between consumer values, brand values, and sustainability
- to be able to communicate complex information to a broad audienceto understand how to assess consumer undestanding and reactions to green messages
- to learn the unique aspects of developing a truly sustainable brand
As the core class for MBA students on management accounting, this class ensures that students understand how to estimate costs and benefits of alternative decisions, balance short run and long run cost decisions, focus on value chain analyses of target costs and quality costs, and develop effective and appropriate performance measures for individuals and organizations. Students learn to develop and communicate effective performance evaluations for employees that are bound and reflective of actual performance results and targets. The Balanced Scorecard framework for holistic performance measurement is introduced as a module in the class along with a consideration of the triple bottom line approach to measurement.
This course explores the challenges faced by managers of multinational corporations. How is managing an international firm different from managing a domestic one? Why and how do firms become international, and which ones are the most successful? Students learn to critically evaluate alternative international strategies including capabilities to enter and operate in foreign markets; organize and manage global operations; and confront strategic challenges that arise as firms compete in the global economy, including marketing issues, cross-cultural challenges, and managing competition. Different attitudes about financial, social and environmental stewardship are addressed throughout the class, culminating in a dedicated case analysis of corporate social responsibility in an international context.
Van Jones, human rights pioneer; author of The Green-Collar Economy; served as green jobs advisor for the Obama administration in 2009. The economy has shifted and emerging business opportunities that are centered on repairing urban environmental damage or improving environmental performance, can contribute to our economic recovery and help solve persistent problems of economic inclusion and justice.
Geoff Ashton, Calvert Investments, presented data illustrating the growth in and performance of green investing over the past decade, highlighting driving forces and key questions that will affect investment decisions in the coming decade, as awareness of sustainability issues increases and investors continue to segment their investing strategies.
John Frazier, Director of Considered Chemistry, Sustainable Business and Innovation, presented to interdisciplinary students about the potential for innovations to dramatically improve our products' performance, in terms of resources use, supply chain and ecological footprints. These improvements deliver measurable financial benefits to the manufacturer and its business partners along with value chain, but also ensure that consumers continue to gain the desired product experience and performance.
James E. Hansen, NASA, provided and in-depth picture of global climate science, along with respective benefits and costs associated with efforts to mitigate climate impacts and adapt to changing climactic conditions.
Designed to bring together leading Oregon businesses and service organizations in order to forge deeper collaborative relationships between the University and business community, the 2010 Leadership focused on two major University initiatives: The Green Product Design Network and Sustainable Cities Initiative.
The event, attended by 125 representatives, has established a platform for collaboration in several key program activities, based on a stronger common understanding of emerging issues and opportunities related to sustainability in Oregon.
Emergent topics that resulted from this conference:
Composting policy summit - to identify pathways toward improved and increased recovery of organic waste
Green Product design support & supply chain analysis - to support several Oregon companies in the activewear and outdoor apparel sectors, working together to develop and test the Eco-Index
Regina Hauser, Executive Director of The Natural Step Network, introduced students to the principles, framework and tools of The Natural Step, and provided tangible case studies of how innovative businesses have improved their performance and enhanced relationships with customers and business partners.
For 14 years, students at the University of Oregon have organized and delivered a sustainable business conference, which has evolved into its current format, jointly delivered by MBA and Law students through the Green Business Initiative.
Each year, the event features, nationally-renowned experts in focused, in-depth panel discussions. These sessions are designed to deepen students' exposure to and understanding of the fundamental and timely issues related to sustainability and the business sector.
Attendance at each event ranges from 150 to 200 people.
James E. McWilliams, History, Texas State University, San Marcos, presented key directions in the rapidly evolving food industry that will have benefits from economic, environmental and social equity perspectives, including better resilience, opportunities for new businesses, better health, stronger rural-urban ties in agricultural communities.
Daniel F. Becker, director, Safe Climate Campaign, presented results of analysis showing how fuel efficiency standards can contribute to greater fuel efficiency, reduced fuel dependence and lower greenhouse gas emissions.
The 2011 Advertising and Consumer Psychology Conference will focus on environmental sustainability. The conference will look at consumer psychology of marketing communications, corporate advertising strategy, corporate social responsibility programs, greenwashing, social media and sustainability, and other marketing and advertising topics related to sustainability.
This conference is a research conference, bringing together research expertise from across North America, with some international participation. The goal is increase our knowledge of consumer psychology related to sustainability, and how advertising and marketing influence consumers.
Thomas Lyon, Director of Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise, University of Michigan. Presentation of results of a study on markets in which consumers prefer environmentally friendly products but cannot determine the environmental quality of any given firm’s product on their own. A non-governmental organization (NGO) can establish a voluntary standard and label the products of firms whose products comply with the standard. Alternatively, industry can create its own standard and label. We compare the stringency of these two labels, and analyze how they interact.
Jules Bailey, principal of Pareto Global, provided an intensive introduction to clean energy economics and finance, with a focus on emerging market opportunities, key policy and institutional drivers, structural shifts in capital investment markets, and overall opportunity for Oregon’s economy.
Ravi Subramanian, Assistant Professor
Georgia Institute of Technology
Visit, Friday, February 4, 2011
Abstract
Firms often determine whether or not to make components common across products by focusing on the manufacturing and sales of new products only. However, component commonality decisions that ignore remanufacturing can adversely affect the profitability of the firm. In this paper, we analyze how remanufacturing – by either the OEM or a third party – could reverse the OEM’s commonality decision that is based on the manufacturing and sales of new products alone. Specifically, we determine conditions under which the OEM’s optimal decision on commonality may be reversed and illustrate how her profit can be higher if remanufacturing is taken into account ex ante. We also compare the likelihood of commonality decision reversals and associated profit impacts between the OEM and third party remanufacturing scenarios.
Beril Toktay, Associate Professor
Georgia Institute of Technology
Abstract
Secondary markets in the Information Technology (IT) industry, where used or refurbished equipment is traded, have been growing steadily. For Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) in this industry, the importance of secondary markets has grown in parallel, not only as a source of revenue, but also because of their impact on these firms' competitive advantage and market strategy. Recent articles in the press have severely criticized some OEMs who are perceived to be actively trying to eliminate the secondary market for their products. Others have policies that enhance their secondary markets. The goal of this paper is to understand how an OEM's incentives and optimal strategies vis-a-vis the secondary market are shaped contingent on her relative competitive advantage, product characteristics and consumer preferences. The critical tradeoff that we examine is whether the indirect benefit from maintaining an active secondary market (the resale value effect) can outweigh the potentially negative effect of the sales of used products at the expense of new product sales (the cannibalization effect). To that end, we develop a model where the OEM can directly affect the resale value of her product through a relicensing fee charged to the buyer of the refurbished equipment. Moreover, we introduce a measure of the consumers' willingness to return their used products to account for the fact that the higher the price offered by a third-party entrant, the higher the ratio of returned products at their end-of-use. We analyze the OEM's strategy in both the monopoly and the duopoly cases, characterize the optimal relicensing fee set by the OEM, and draw conclusions on the conditions that favor stimulating or deterring the secondary market.
Denis Hayes, President & CEO of Bullitt Foundation, gave a presentation addressing the present-day challenge of ensuring economic and social well-being for a global population based on current resource use and consumption patterns. The presentation focused on identifying ways to measure prosperity, drastically improve our use of resources for consumption, and protect critical ecosystems that are vital to future resource productivity.
Dennis Wilde, principal of Gerding Edlen Development Company, presented cases on the business case for sustainable development, from individual buildings to neighborhood-scale projects, and provided students with an introduction to the business strategy needs for a developer looking to gain market advantage associated with the transformation of the development market toward increasing green levels of performance.
Joshua Proudfoot, principal of Good Company, presented students with information about how to build a successful small consulting firm that targets sustainability-related program consulting. Key areas of focus relate to business development challenges and working in partnership with clients to secure funding for innovative projects, staff training and development to ensure leading-edge capabilities, and how to differentiate services from competitors.
Tim Kraft, PhD Candidate
Stanford University
Abstract
As public awareness of environmental hazards increases, a growing concern for corporations is the potential negative environmental impact of their products and the chemicals those products contain. When a substance within a product is identified as potentially hazardous (e.g., bisphenol-A (BPA) in baby bottles and triclosan in soaps and toothpastes), without regulations in place it is often difficult for a firm to financially justify the proactive replacement of the substance. From the perspective of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), groups such as ChemSec play an active role in removing potentially hazardous substances from commercial use by either targeting firms with negative press or by petitioning regulatory bodies to increase the likelihood of regulation. An NGO interested in influencing firms to replace a potentially hazardous substance must develop a strategy for how to best utilize its often limited resources.
A firm’s decisions are complicated by uncertainty in substance risk, regulations, and market sensitivity, as well as the existence of external stakeholders such as NGOs who may want the firm to develop a replacement substance. We investigate the timing and intensity of the firm’s investments to replace a substance. A two-stage dynamic program is used to model the problem. Our results indicate that large firms, in particular, must dedicate resources to monitoring and potentially planning the replacement of a substance. Although the additional management will be costly, it may prevent even larger losses such as inventory write-offs, profit losses, or liability costs. In the second part of the talk, we investigate the role NGOs play in removing a potentially hazardous substance from commercial use. We analyze the NGO’s decisions of who to target – the industry or the regulatory body – and how much effort to exert. In addition, we further investigate whether NGOs should take a pragmatic approach and partner with firms or maintain an antagonistic relationship. A game-theoretic, two-stage model is used to model the problem. Our results indicate that pressuring the regulatory body is most effective when the existing likelihood of regulation is low and the expected penalty for not being prepared for regulation is high. (Joint works with Feryal Erhun, Robert Carlson, and Dariush Rafinejad; Yanchong Zheng and Feryal Erhun)
Justin Yuen, CEO of fmyi (fmyi.com), provided an introduction to social networking that focused explicitly on sustainability performance, including information about how to use existing social media platforms to engage key stakeholders such as employees, shareholders, customers and suppliers.
Eric J. Beckman, George M. Bevier Professor of Engineering &
Co-Director, Mascaro Sustainability Initiative, presented to an interdisciplinary set of students about how green design has, over the past decade, become very much a part of the toolkit for those creating the next generation of products and services. This has become the case for those of us who work at the molecular level (chemists) as well as those who operate at length scales of meters (architects). At the same time, today’s green designers face some substantial challenges if we want to continue, or even enhance, the pace at which green design advances. For example, while much attention is focused on green material design, it is often the additive package to materials (e.g., flame retardants, plasticizers, preservatives) rather than the material itself that causes environmental issues. Additives are produced, by and large, outside the US, and additive design is not considered a terribly glamorous field, meaning that progress to date has been slow. Moving to longer length scales, while improvements in new home construction have allowed for dramatic drops in energy usage, the means by which the energy load of existing homes is reduced have not changed measurably in decades, despite the fact that these existing homes (and commercial buildings) consume a sizable fraction of our nation’s electricity. This talk presents a number of pressing issues for today’s students of green design, showing how collaborations between disparate disciplines will be needed to make significant breakthroughs.
The list of values (LOV) was administered in a national survey in 2007 to monitor social values across key demographic variables in the United States (Kahle, 1983). The results were compared and contrasted with those in two previous national surveys in 1976 and 1986. This study provides a rare glimpse into the changes in social values in America for the last three decades. We find that deficit values are being replaced by excess values over time in America. This suggests that some of the more traditional advertising approaches that relied on deficit values may need to be replaced by newer tactics that tap into excess values.
I draw upon the dynamic capability model to explore how new process standards influence the ability of manufacturing facilities to improve environmental performance by reducing toxic emissions. The process standards studied are the ISO 14001 environmental management standards, in use since 1996. Hypotheses are developed to account for how early adoption of ISO 14001 and experience with the standards influence emission levels. These hypotheses are tested using a large sample of electronics manufacturing facilities and data from 1996 through 2001. Consistent with theoretical expectations, analyses show that being one of the first facilities to adopt ISO 14001 was associated with lower emissions. Further, a separate effect is due to experience: the longer a facility operated under ISO 14001, the lower its emissions. The paper discusses the implications of these results for theory and policy.
Firms engage in environmental marketing in order to appeal to environmentally conscious consumers. Within the context of the forest product industry, this research uses data from two studies to empirically test whether a relationship exists between demographic/psychographic characteristics and reported environmentally conscious intentions. In both studies, the results indicate that the environmental marketing of certified/ecolabeled forest products appeals to a segment of environmentally conscious consumers. This appeal occurs for both a value-added product (furniture) and a non-value-added product (plywood). Thus, there is support for the argument that environmental marketing to environmentally conscious consumers can result in ‘green segmentation’. Key findings from this study suggest that those consumers reporting the strongest preferences for environmentally certified forest products were more willing to pay a premium for certified products, more likely to display environmentally conscious behavior and more likely to perceive that green consumer purchases effectively benefit the environment. These characteristics were most common among females and those familiar with the concept of environmental certification. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and EPR Environment.
The country’s largest corporations have hit a road bump on their way toward factoring sustainability into their transportation choices. Despite pressures from customers and investors — and the prospect of ever volatile energy costs — just 9% of Fortune 500 companies include environmental goals in their public documents. A study of those 44 companies reveals some of the best practices that can help a business go the distance, ultimately working with its partners to rethink its entire transportation infrastructure. Companies must demonstrate three distinct levels of integration before they can embed the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions into their transportation strategies: establishing a foundation (acknowledging the problem), changing internal company practices (building an environmentally aware culture) and impacting supply chain practices (such as better vehicle utilization or more efficient routing). Within these categories, the tactics need to be measured by carefully calibrated metrics that can track both environmental and financial progress. As employees begin adapting their own decision making to the new priority — by, for instance, choosing videoconferencing instead of traveling — executives should spread such success stories, reinforcing the institutional preference.
The huge amounts spent on store security and crime prevention worldwide, not only costs international businesses, but also amounts to a hidden tax on those law-binding consumers who bear higher prices. Most previous research has focused on shoplifting and ignored many other ways in which consumers cheat businesses. Using a hybrid of both qualitative research and survey approaches in four countries, an index of 37activities was developed to examine consumers’ unethical activities across UK, US, France, and Austria. The findings indicate that around three quarters of consumers in all four countries can be classified as heavy offenders for these minor cheats. The paper argues that government agencies, marketers, and retailers should adopt more proactive preventative approaches, rather than reactive loss limitation measures to combat unethical behavior.
This paper focuses on the role of the family, and related issues associated with short-term international assignments from the assignees' perspective. Conceptually our study utilizes discourse analysis set within a social constructionist framework to understand these issues better. Our research is a longitudinal case study which encompasses 22 interviews with short-term assignees employed by a US-based MNC. Despite the physical absence of the family/spouse on short-term assignments, a number of family related concerns emerge in our study. First, 'single' assignees, as well as married assignees, have family related concerns. Second, extended, as well as immediate family, are influential in the assignment process. Third, long-distance family support is crucial in the wake of assignment-imposed separation. Finally, there are significant family issues associated with repatriation in the aftermath of a short-term assignment.
This paper considers how a firm's system of exchange skills including internal technical expertise and supplier governance mechanisms influence supplier performance, both independently and jointly. The core question is whether inter-firm governance mechanisms, including both relational and contractual mechanisms, can substitute for a firm’s internal technical skills in maintaining supplier performance or, alternatively, whether a firm risks hollowing itself out by de-emphasizing internal expertise when it outsources. The arguments build on the capabilities, inter-organizational governance, and supply management literature. We find that internal technical expertise influences multiple dimensions of supplier performance, including cooperation, price, quality, delivery, and communication, while relational governance also affects supplier performance though in a more focused way. In turn, combinations of technical expertise, relational governance, and contractual agreements jointly affect supplier performance. Thus, firms generate superior supplier performance if they retain internal technical skills as well as increase their use of external governance mechanisms to manage buyer-supplier relationships.
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