Sustainable Entrepreneurship MBA to Launch in Vermont: MBA News

By QS Contributor Updated Jun 15, 2014

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Introduction
Sustainable Entrepreneurship MBA aims to position University of Vermont alongside leading business schools

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The University Of Vermont School Of Business Administration is remodeling its traditional MBA into a sustainable entrepreneurship MBA in a bid to gain national recognition.

Whilst many leading business schools offer sustainable MBA programs, the University of Vermont (UVM) hopes to find a niche by combining this approach with hands-on entrepreneurial experience aimed at giving its students a kick-start in founding their own sustainable business.

The school’s dean, Sanjay Sharma, comments, “There are sustainable MBA programs with theoretical courses that provide an understanding of sustainability, but none that offer a hands-on entrepreneurship program with a practicum focusing on how you go about establishing a sustainable venture. The world has big sustainability challenges, and this program is one of the only ones in the world designed to address them.”

Sustainable Entrepreneurship MBA aims to position University of Vermont alongside leading business schools

The new course at UVM, known as SEMBA (or MBA program in Sustainable Entrepreneurship), will officially start in the fall of 2014 – with applications open from now until the end of the year. The school hopes to produce 50 graduates for three consecutive years to then merit inclusion in the U.S. News & World Report business school listings.

If and when that can be achieved, competition will come from business schools already known in North America for providing MBAS with the kind of tools required to succeed in sustainable entrepreneurship. For example, Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, which offers a joint MBA/Master of Environmental Management program and McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management, which holds a global business conference on sustainability.

At the sustainable entrepreneurship MBA program’s helm is Professor Willy Cats-Baril, formerly a Senior Research Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science as well as Visiting Professor at INSEAD, France. He said, in an article for the University of Vermont’s website, “We want to provide them with the necessary tools to make business an integral part of the solution to serious world problems such as unequal prosperity, climate change, access to clean water and air, and inexpensive and renewable energy sources.”

One interesting feature of UVM’s sustainable entrepreneurship program is a three month period in which students start or expand a sustainable business. Another is the automatic inclusion of its MBA intake to the Vermont Business for Social Responsibility (VBSR), a non-profit, statewide business trade organization that puts issues of economic, social and environmental ethics at the heart of its work.

Learn more about sustainable MBAS >