Sustainable Business Model Development

Sunny Jeong, Wittenberg University, Business and Economics

Summary

This course will explore this emerging, highly interdisciplinary field of social entrepreneurship through a social venture business plan and teams can choose topics provided at the beginning of this semester including circular economy and sustainability.

Students as a group need to work on 10 blocks of business model that learn during the semester: Customer Segments, Value Propositions, Channels, Customer Relationships, Revenue Streams, Key Resources, Key Activities, Key Partnerships, Cost Structure and social impact.

Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Management | College Lower (13-14)

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Learning Goals

Students will learn concepts and content of social venture business plan development and how to turn a major global issue of sustainability into business solution via social venture developments. Students need to conduct research as a group to incorporate disciplinary knowledge including environmental disciplines beyond business on their own and critically analyze why existing solutions are not sufficient or failing. Once they develop an innovative and creative business solution, they need to create a roadmap for business success, focusing on areas such as finances, operational issues, and marketing. Students will present their solutions to the entire class.

Context for Use

This activity is a follow-on to the Wicked Problem of an Equitable Zero-Waste Circular Economy module.

This is a course project for entrepreneurship courses including social entrepreneurship for lower or upper level of undergraduate students. Class size can be 10-50 and at least 2 weeks are needed to guide and for students to present. No other disciplinary skills or concepts are necessary but any knowledge on finance (cost and revenue) will be helpful but not essential. This project can be easily adopted to other management or entrepreneurship courses.

Description and Teaching Materials

Social Business Plan Outline
Blueprint Scoring Sheet (Microsoft Word 2007 (.docx) 18kB Apr17 23)

Teaching Notes and Tips

Depending on your focus, you can change weighting percentage of evaluation items on the scoring sheet that I provide. I emphasize innovative idea and creativity in business model rather than accuracy of data on social issues they researched or financial scrutiny.