Meeting dates: April 22, 2019 - May 10, 2019

This course connects market-driven impacts and successful private enterprise management directly to the world’s most challenging problems. The role and power of markets to impact positively the sustainable development goals (SDGs) is central to the course’s conceptualization. Students acquire and apply – through a dynamic “raw case” methodology -- business competencies to impact global problems that serve also to assure and enhance the long-term viability and sustainability of the enterprise. Morover, the course introduces students to the concept of not just business impact on problems, but of blended impact – the solution power we produce by aligning private sector, public sector, and nonmarket (i.e., the nonprofit sector) efforts—and the skills, competencies, and tools that permit us to do that. The course aims to build a competent foundation in enabling for-profit enterprises to tackle wicked problems, and a course that students leave with clear ideas of additional business competencies they wish to build while here at MIIS. The educational philosophy of the course is founded on adaptive learning, learning-on-demand, and capacity building in learning-to-learn. Adaptive learning also means incorporating cross-disciplinary perspectives, frameworks, and techniques often in compressed time frames. Students should expect similar complexity, ambiguity, uncertainty, and volatility throughout the raw-case study as dealing with a tough business problem in real life.