How to use cooperation and partnership to successfully tackle sustainability issues?

The development goals are huge. The challenges are enormous. The problems seem insurmountable. It’s easy to get overwhelmed. But where there’s a will, there’s a way! Desmond Tutu once wisely said that “there is only one way to eat an elephant: a bite at a time.” Even the seemingly impossible can be achieved by taking on just a little at a time.

In the first part of the webinar Lars Huemer will be talking on using cooperation and partnership to successfully tackle sustainability issues. In the second part you will get experience what this means in an interactive workshop from Bouvet about how organizations can be less linear and more circular through collaboration and partnerships.

There is no need for prior knowledge about the theme before signing up.

The event starts at 14:00 Central European Time, it depends on your time zone what time this will be at your location.

Target group

This webinar is aimed at designers, innovators, and change-makers working in or with public sector institutions at any level, with a particular interest in sustainability issues. We will be using Miro as a digital collaboration tool for this workshop, we except you to have some prior experience using Miro.

Please join the webinar form a laptop or desktop computer as the workshop will ben interactive.

Keynote – Lars Huemer

Lars will talk about goal 17, global partnership, and how this goal may impact others. Here, Lars will challenge the discipline of strategy. Strategic management is often about gaining a competitive advantage by finding a resource that is rare and hard to copy.

A patent on a corona vaccine would boost the competitive advantage of the firm controlling the patent; it would make the vaccine rare and harder to copy. However, value creation on a societal level of analysis would not benefit from such an advantage. What if the goal of an administration or company is to hire the best people with the most skills. Is this the right strategy when what we need most of all is to cooperate? We need to ask different questions: Does this person complement the rest of the group? Will they bring out the best or the worst in the others?

In his talk, Lars will use known examples to inspire and challenge us to think differently about how we take on sustainability issues with other people across the world.

Lars is Professor of Strategy and associate dean of BI’s master program in energy. Lars’ research focus is on cooperative strategy, value creation in networks, and trust-based leadership. Lars has worked at Fudan School of Management in Shanghai, ISM University of Management and Economics in Vilnius, Foreign Trade University in Hanoi, and Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Lars has published in high ranked academic journals including Financial Times listed Journal of Management Studies and Journal of Business Ethics, in addition to Long Range Planning, Journal of Business Research and Industrial Marketing Management.

Workshop – Maren Volsdal Skirbekk

From the seeds of a tomato to the pizza on you table, in this workshop we’ll study a specific value chain and use methods to identify and develop new circular opportunities through partnerships.

The workshop will be centered around the sustainability goals “global partnerships to reach the goals” and “sustainable consumption and production”. We believe that there are many similar challenges and possibilities across our borders to succeed. The workshop will be facilitated by Maren and other service designers from Bouvet.

Maren is the service design division manager in Bouvet. She is an experienced designer and advisor specializing in human centered design, and service design. Her clients have included household names in most service sectors, including government, NGOs, financial services, telecommunications.

In her work, Maren demystifies the design process by inviting her team and stakeholders on the journey. She quickly sees and understands her clients’ challenges and scales her work to fit the scope. She is diplomatic and pragmatic, but she never lets the goal and the user out of sight.

She has taught human centered design methods, project management for designers and inclusive/universal design at NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology). She has also spoken and held several workshops in conferences like Yggdrasil and Y.