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The holistic approach of the Mannheim Master in Sustainability and Impact Management guarantees that impact management will become an integral element of all operational areas of the company.
We have devised a program structure and course contents that will provide impactful learning.
Participants become proficient in essential management skills with a specific focus on challenges of the future like sustainable impact management in an increasingly digitalized environment. Insights into current best practices from various companies and industries as well as personal skills courses round off the program.
The Mannheim Master in Sustainability and Impact Management is organized in modules that build on each other over a period of 24 months. This allows you to retain full-time employment throughout the program and apply your newly acquired knowledge directly at your workplace. (Click to enlarge the chart)
The core courses lay the foundation for the three key areas: Sustainability and Impact Management Knowledge and Methods; Basic Management Knowledge with a Focus on Sustainability Challenges; and Change Management, Personal Skills Development and Collaboration.
Electives help you deepen your knowledge in your specific areas of interest and focus on your career goals.
Working in a team with your fellow students, you will apply the knowledge and methodologies acquired throughout your studies in a hands-on project for one of our partner companies.
Essential program elements such as the Sustainability and Impact Management Master Project require that you work with classmates in heterogeneous teams, just as you would at your workplace. Personal skills courses (e.g. presentation skills, agile methods, etc.) foster the necessary key qualities you need for management positions.
The program includes regular workshops where participants can take a deep dive into current topics and practical challenges. These events further provide room for networking and exchange of knowledge. Over and above individual learning, we aim to create a community that fosters peer learning.
Make an impact. Please find a detailed description of the individual courses of the Mannheimer Master in Sustainability and Impact Management below.
When building their sustainability strategy, managers need to understand the company-specific materiality of certain sustainability domains and topics from stakeholders‘ as well as their own perspective and the resulting risks and potential rewards.
Frameworks of materiality analysis and domains of sustainability impacts that are relevant for reporting serve as a basis for the company to develop their individual approach to sustainability.
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The sustainability issues that humanity is facing induce and urgent need to rethink and redesign existing business models to manage the transition to a more sustainable economy.
In this context, the idea of a circular, instead of a linear economy has gained increased attention, i.e., an economy in which is regenerative by design and aims to decouple growth from the consumption of finite resources.
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Following the „what can‘t be measured can‘t be managed“ logic, organizations have increasingly introduced scientific methods of impact measurement to make their sustainability-related impacts transparent and comparable. Some organizations have further started to assign monetary values to these impacts. This practice is referred to as valuation.
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Digitalization plays a crucial role for sustainability. On the one hand, the mega trend of digitalization incurs new sustainability and responsibility issues, as, e.g., increased energy consumption, electronic waste, data security, or scarcity of resources. Against this background, the term "Corporate Digital Responsibility" has been coined. On the other hand, digital innovations help to create more sustainable products, consumption patterns, business models, and can be applied to increase transparency about sustainability impacts (e.g., through artificial intelligence or blockchain solutions).
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Sustainability communication can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, stakeholders want to be informed about an organizations‘ impacts. On the other hand, talking too much about one‘s own sustainability achievements may lead to perceptions of greenwashing and trigger stakeholders‘ skepticism. Further, new communication pathways, e.g., via social media offer avenues for two way communication and dialogue which so far, remains underexplored by many organizations.
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At the core of the sustainability transformation of organizations is the sustainability management team which develops strategies, measures impacts, collects and analyzes data, engages with stakeholders and prepares reports. The way in which sustainability is managed in companies varies greatly with organizations having a single sustainability manager to ones that have committees spanning all functional areas.
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The topic of sustainability is fast changing. Companies and industries have to adapt to new regulation, new competition, and new consumer demands on a regular basis. This requires the ongoing anticipation of upcoming trends and emerging topics and the development on strategies to prepare for them.
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Climate change means the warming-up of our planet driven by human emissions of greenhouse gases, as well as the shifts in weather patterns that results from this development. In the Paris Agreement, a legally binding international treaty on climate change, 196 Parties have set the goal to limit global warming to well below 2, preferably to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels.
To reach this goal, many companies have developed climate targets, including goals for carbon neutrality or climate neutrality, some of them using offsetting techniques to make up for their own impacts.
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Frameworks of sustainability and guidelines for business conduct to ensure sustainability have quickly evolved over the last decades. Until today, the debate about the dimensions of sustainability and respective indicators of sustainability performance is not yet resolved and many see corporate responsibility as an essentially contested concept. Consolidation and standardization are necessary steps to ensure effective regulation, reporting, and thus transparency.
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Making an organization more sustainable oftentimes means introducing change to the organization which may lead to resistance. Such change processes have to be carefully designed and managed to be effective and managers need to have a clear understanding of stakeholder attitudes and organizational dynamics.
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Markets are key drivers of sustainability and an increasing consumer demand for sustainable products has led to mainstream retailers including sustainable products into their portfolios. At the same time, in many industries, what consumers report in surveys with regards to their sustainability attitudes differs greatly from what they really do at the checkout (referred to as the consumer paradox). Companies for instance frequently complain about a lack of willingness-to-pay for sustainable products. Understanding market dynamics and consumer demand are thus urgently needed skills to steer towards sustainability.
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In the management of sustainability, accounting plays a crucial role to enable decision makers to include sustainability impacts into their decision making. Many organizations are this redesigning their accounting systems to include sustainability-related information. Further, over the last years, the public awareness of tax evasion practices has continuously increased. While these practices may be legal, a strong social norm is emerging that views avoiding tax payments as socially irresponsible. Instead of making large donations, many argue, companies should start by paying their taxes.
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Markets are currently disrupted by the emergence of new forms of organizations, e.g., sharing economy platforms. These new forms of organizations often leverage the power of information and communication technology and sometimes circumvent traditional market regulation. While many of these new business models may have positive effects on planet and people, they are also increasingly critically discussed for their potential adverse impacts.
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The European Action Plan for Financing Sustainable Growth, or Sustainable Finance Action Plan, focuses on the Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) fields of activity in order to achieve sustainability goals together with the financial sector.
This is also accompanied by binding legal requirements for companies. The EU taxonomy, for example, represents a uniform classification system for sustainable economic activities and investments for six defined environmental objectives.
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Environment-Social-Governance – Governance is one of the three key pillars of sustainable business and the key to realizing positive impacts on people and planet. Various organizations have redesigned their governance to not only ensure responsible business practices, but also to incentivize and thereby shape the sustainability transformation.
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At the heart of the sustainability transformation lies the creativity and motivation of managers and employees who shape these developments. Thus, besides responsible people management to ensure the equal treatment and well-being of employees, people management has developed into a toolbox to empower the employees to be intrapreneurs and co-creators of sustainability-related innovation processes. Further, many companies have realized that employees expect their employers to take a proactive stance in the sustainability transformation.
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Sustainability should start within the own four walls and companies need to examine their own operations in the attempt to find potential for sustainability improvements. Over and above, an increasing discussion relates to corporate responsibilities for supply chain impacts, i.e., not just in tier 1 suppliers but even further upstream the supply chain. Managing these impacts necessitates a deep understanding of environmental as well as social impacts in the own and in suppliers‘ business operations.
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The proliferation of corporate scandals over the last years has illustrated how important it is for organizations to ensure that ethical norms are known and followed by their members. The field of compliance management and the tool of codes of ethics have thus received increased attention and many companies have set up respective units. Some companies even use gamification methods to teach employees about codes of ethics. Recently, the topic of compliance has further moved center stage due to new ethical risks through digitalization.
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The mere existence of SDG 17 – partnerships for sustainable development – indicates that no one can solve the pressing sustainability challenges which we are facing alone. We need effective partnerships, also across borders of organizations, industries, countries and companies, to find effective solutions to sustainability problems.
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Over the recent year, the traditional distinction between for profit and non-profit organization has been shifted to allow for a new variety of organizations in between. Specifically, social entrepreneurs have increasingly set out to use market-based business models to solve social or environmental issues and make a positive impact. Further, social intrapreneurs are increasingly contributing to the sustainability transformation of large organizations with some companies even setting up structured programs to support them.
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Sustainability is a new topic for many organizations and to transform existing business processes, employees and managers of the future need entrepreneurial thinking and a changemaker mindset.
Anecdotal evidence from best practice firms shows that having people with such a mindset in the organization can enable firms to not only be more sustainable, but also innovative, agile, and resilient.
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More and more companies define and proclaim their higher purpose beyond making profits. This implies that companies reflect upon their core business activities and competences and how they can leverage them to have a positive impact on people and planet.
In many companies, this implies that traditional social responsibility activities are redesigned to be an expression of the higher purpose of the specific organization while providing opportunities for participation for the companies‘ stakeholders.
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Given the manifold impacts that businesses have on their stakeholders, voices have grown louder that they should allow these stakeholders to have a say in how the business is governed and how decisions are made. Over the last years, an increasing number of organizations has developed way in which a wide variety of stakeholders can actively voice their opinions in stakeholder engagement and dialogue formats.
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The increasing availability of large amounts of data, including unstructured data, as well as new methods of analyzing such data have fueled the existing debate around a need for more evidence-based management. Thus, many companies are facing the challenge to build a structured approach to handling existing data and gaining insights from additional data sources. This is especially important in the field of sustainability, as companies need up to date knowledge on stakeholders and markets to successfully steer through this transition.
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Sustainability is a new topic for many organizations and their members. Gamification offers manifold opportunities to educate members of organizations about sustainability topics in an engaging and effective way. Companies are already adopting such techniques, for instance in the field of compliance management and codes of ethics.
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Sustainability is a trending topic today. Still, it has a long history and thoughts on resource efficiency and sustainable models of organization and exchange have been around for centuries. Delving into the history of sustainability can help to understand not only the roots of today‘s sustainability movement, but also the complexities of the current sustainability transformation.
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All information is subject to approval by the university committees. Therefore, changes to study design and content as well as admission requirements are still possible.
Elective courses are subject to class size and availability.