The webinar on how to use cooperation and partnership to succesfully tackle sustainability issues took place on 12 May 2022.
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 talked about using cooperation and partnership to successfully tackle sustainability issues. In the second part the participants got experience what this means in an interactive workshop from Bouvet about how organizations can be less linear and more circular through collaboration and partnerships.
Replay
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.
Organisation
The webinar is organized by members of the international Design in Government community:
- D-box – National Center for Transforming public services, consisting of DOGA (Design and Architecture Norway), AHO (the Oslo School of architecture and design) and BI (Norwegian business school)
- Bouvet, a Norwegian consultancy which designs, develops and provides advice on IT solutions and digital communication for public and private sector
- The Dutch community Gebruiker Centraal (User Needs First)
- The School of Design – UdeSA (San Andres University in Buenos Aires, Argentina)
