Episode 3: The Sustainability Skillset
Host:
Dr. Kasie Whitener, Clinical Assistant Professor, Management
Guest:
Dr. Kealy Carter, Clinical Associate Professor, Marketing
episode photo courtesy of Colorado State at this link.
Conversation topics:
- Applied research: what are the big issues facing businesses today?
- Sustainability - growth in sustainably marketing products
- Is sustainability a corporate buzzword?
- No, companies have been engaging on this for 35 or 40 years
- The word itself has just seen exponential use in media and policy
- UN sustainable development goals
- Environmental, Social, Economic
- Sustainability is a global problem and requires attention and action across multiple categories of stakeholders
- Scope 1, Scope 2, Scope 3 emissions and companies addressing their own environmental impact
- Value chain impacts: how to we influence suppliers and consumers
- 1 - the emissions of your specific activities (i.e. manufacturing)
- 2 - the emissions of your suppliers as you accessed their products (i.e. energy production and consumption)
- 3 - all the emissions throughout your value chain - from raw material growth and transport, to product disposal - much harder to affect but where many companies are focused now
- In the classroom: what businesses are we studying? What conversations are we having?
- The business case for these focused activities
- This is not philanthropy or altruism, it’s strategy.
- The triple bottom line: People, Planet, Profit
- A lot of these companies have been on this journey for decades
- Investment community started paying attention to ESG performance
- The tension between short term gains and long term investments and where sustainability lives therein
- The sustainability concentration: a 12-credit sequence that can be added on to any major in the Moore School
- Lifecycle recognition and analysis
- Carbon footprint metrics and analysis
- Reporting frameworks and their strengths and weaknesses
- Collaborative efforts in South Carolina including SC Nexus for Advanced Resilient Energy
- The functional skillset and the bigger picture understanding of sustainability: an interdisciplinary concept that requires understanding outside of the traditional business education - get the science, get the engineering, get the added components to provide a full understanding and accessible skillset.
When you learn Moore, you know more, and when you know Moore, you do more.
Thanks for listening!
Moore Impact is a product of the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina. For episodes, notes, and links visit sc.edu/moore
