The overall aim of the course is to provide students with knowledge and skills on how companies can design and implement sustainable and responsible business strategies and business models. At an overarching level, this involves understanding the relationship between companies’ financial, social and environmental performance dimensions. That is, it relates to how business decisions not only have financial implications, but also social and environmental consequences. Achieving sustainable value creation involves identifying, prioritizing, managing, measuring and reporting on social and environmental performance dimensions as well as traditional financial performance dimensions. Crucially, these might sometimes be in conflict and require trade-off assessments, while other times there may be "win-win" opportunities, i.e. situations in which improving social and environmental performance might also lead to financial benefits.
Importantly, the twofold use of the concepts "sustainable" and "responsible" in the title of the course implies that students not only need to address sustainable value creation from a business perspective; that is, in a manner that enables companies to manage risks and exploit opportunities related to social and environmental footprints. In addition, students should be able to identify and deal with normative questions related to which responsibilities companies have for such social and environmental footprints, and how far this responsibility extends.