There is growing demand that business schools equip students with socially minded contemporary business practices (AACSB, 2010). The call for business schools to take sustainability and social responsibility education seriously extends beyond accrediting bodies and, indeed, even academia. For example, the United Nations recently called on business schools worldwide to align with internationally accepted values that support an inclusive and sustainable global economy and extend corporate responsibility and sustainability in mainstream business related education (PRME, 2011). The term ‘sustainability’is a proxy for being socially and environmentally responsible and is often used interchangeably with other terms such as ‘corporate social responsibility’(CSR),‘corporate citizenship’,‘social enterprise’,‘sustainable development’,‘the triple bottom line’, and ‘corporate ethics’. Each of these terms relates to the complex demands that a growing array of interconnected market and non-market stakeholders are placing upon firms today to be successful not only financially but also in terms of their social and environmental performance (Moore et al., 1992; Starik and Gribbon, 1993; Sharma and Vredenburg, 1998; Andriof and Waddock, 2002). Business schools are responding to these calls by looking for ways to adapt their curricula, courses, teaching methodologies, research, and institutional strategies to better prepare their graduates to act more responsibly, both socially and environmentally, as well as to advocate and guide firms on sustainable business model development.
In the sections below, we outline how our MBA program was redesigned to center around stakeholder value creation. The goal of this curricular innovation is to provide students with a holistic perspective of sustainability and CSR. This perspective also reflects the focus provided by the Academy of Management’s areas of interest of Management Education and Development and Organizations and the Natural Environment. In addition, we describe how incorporating stakeholder value provided the opportunity to broaden the sustainability conversations within the classroom beyond just a moral justification to one that provides value from multiple perspectives. While the stakeholder value creation approach is not novel, the embedding of it in management, marketing, business and society, and supply chain courses and the experiential learning tools used is a novel approach. We then highlight how the college’s sustainability outreach initiative, the Sustainable Business Network (SBN), connects and creates meaningful relationships with for-profit and non-profit business stakeholders in our region, facilitating the exchange of best practices and helping to foster dialogue around issues of CSR and ethics, sustainability and eco-innovation, and corporate governance and compliance. Finally, the