Sustainability in action: United Nations Principles of Responsible Management Education (UN PRME)

Principle 6 | Dialogue We will facilitate and support dialogue and debate among different stakeholders around critical issues related to responsibility and sustainability.

6a: Increase the amount of PRME-related external communications, including blogs (e.g. research into practice blogs). Work with the communications and media teams across the University to include SDG tags against outputs to enable tracking of output. 6b: Increase the number of Sustainability Network Speaker Series events co-hosted with other disciplinary group within School of Management and wider university. 6c: Create a sustainability/PRME Advisory group including representatives from diverse stakeholder groups. Goals: We create communities of shared knowledge around critical issues related to responsibility and sustainability by working closely with our students, who are encouraged to network with key stakeholders throughout their studies. The informal Cranfield Sustainability Network convened by the Sustainable Business Group has over 2,000 active members, including faculty, staff, students and alumni from across Cranfield and other universities, together with practitioners from a wide range of businesses and organisations. The Sustainable Business LinkedIn group also serves as a touchpoint for over 1,000 sustainability practitioners, students and alumni. We share our approach to sustainability teaching and learning with other educators: for example, by hosting an Exploring Sustainable Futures game at the British Academy of Management conference. We facilitate dialogue with businesses through events and conferences. For example, faculty and students ran workshops and engaged with participants at the annual Edie Sustainable Leaders conference. Cranfield’s annual Venture Day for entrepreneurs and enterprise investors attracts over 150 attendees and has increasingly been focused on sharing insight and knowledge on the challenges and opportunities presented by social and environmental trends for the owners of smaller businesses. The employers of apprentices are also actively involved with Cranfield and their candidates’ learning. The Sustainability Business Specialist Apprenticeship was designed with input from potential employers; they now join their apprentices at their annual Cranfield residential week to learn about the programme and how apprentices’ learning is driving impact in their organisations. We also create dialogue with businesses on sustainability and responsible management through teaching on executive education programmes. Our engagement with civil society organisations takes a variety of forms. For the second year running, Cranfield are official nominators for The Earthshot Prize. A long-standing relationship with non-profit Waste and Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP) is oriented around an annual student consultancy project which provides fresh insights for WSUP as well as valuable learning for students. Dialogue with government takes place in the context of research projects such as the Dairy Evolution Network (DEX) which worked with policymakers and other stakeholders in the dairy industry to identify future research needs in this sector, and the Resilience Grand Challenge initiative which has influenced the UK government’s approach to organisational resilience. In this reporting period, we also took advantage of an opportunity to build dialogue around sustainability in the media with the UK’s public service broadcaster, the BBC.

18 Sustainability in action