Leading Sustainable Innovation: Seeing the Forest Through the Trees
UVM Accelerates Leadership Development & Tri-Sector Partnership through Online, Team-Based Simulation
Leading Sustainable Innovation: Seeing the Forest through the Trees
I hate to garden. I am the type of person who would rather sit at my desk on a sunny summer day than plant seeds, pull weeds, or harvest anything. So it will surprise those who know me best that I just finished a ‘20-year’ stint as the Director of Forestry in Uruguay, on a team that launched a successful bio-products ‘business’ on the Rio Negro River outside of the city of Mercedes, and I loved every minute of it.
Those ‘20 years’ went by in a flash—it seemed like a mere two months. Eight weeks, in fact.
That’s how long it takes to earn a certificate for Leading Sustainable Innovation, a completely virtual, albeit intense and rigorous, new program offered by the University of Vermont (UVM), home to one of the top “green” MBA programs in the world.
The brainchild of Matt Mayberry, founder of WholeWorks, and Stuart Hart, Ph.D., author of Capitalism at the Crossroads, the program is based on the best research for adult learning: learn, apply, and practice.
The fully online program is comprised of core content from UVM’s top-ranked Sustainable Innovation MBA program. The simulation is a leadership practice field. It is a transformative, fully immersive, team-based simulation of running a new division—“Rio Negro BioProducts (RNB)”—of fictional multinational company “Paper Nation.” Participants learn by doing as they navigate a complex change process, transforming a conventional business into a sustainable one with clear economic, environmental, and social goals—the triple bottom line.
