BGA | BUSINESS IMPACT
I nternational Business School Suzhou at Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool University ( XJTLU), won Best CSR and Sustainability Initiative at the AMBA & BGA Excellence Awards 2022 for its campaign, ‘15 Ways in 15 Weeks’. School Suzhou (IBSS). Each week, themed activities and events took place on topics relating to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs), such as waste management, sustainable transportation and ethical finance. The initiative resulted in the establishment of a Sustainable Future Talents student association as well as ¥13,000 RMB in This was a semester-long initiative, divided into weekly campaigns, that drove sustainable, positive behavioural change at the International Business charitable donations and hundreds of healthier choices. For faculty, staff and students, it also led to positive life changes which individuals must make to achieve the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In this interview, Ellen Touchstone, Associate Dean for Responsible and Sustainable Business Education at IBSS, discusses this initiative – as well as other recent innovations and achievements, plans for the future, and her thoughts on the opportunities for business education. Thank you for speaking to us and sharing your views. To start, could you tell us about your role and what it involves? I’m the inaugural Associate Dean for Responsible and Sustainable Business Education (RSBE) at IBSS XJTLU, where I lead our sustainability team to integrate ERS (ethics, responsibility and sustainability) into the curriculum, and into our daily lives as ‘IBSSers’. IBSS has a Sustainability Committee which comprises of representatives from our five departments, two student groups who focus on this area, Oikos and the Sustainable Future Talents, and the directors of our Centre for Responsible and Sustainable Business Education, CAO Xuanwei, and the W.E. leader Mindfulness Centre, PAN Li (Sunny). In Greater China, IBSS acts as a model for RSBE, having been named a Regional Centre of Expertise by the United Nations University in January 2022, and having signed on as a Signatory to the UN-supported Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME) in 2013, as well as being an Advanced Signatory since 2018. This role, therefore, provides many opportunities for collaboration with companies, NGOs, community members, other Chinese Business Schools, and the government, in order to be as impactful as possible. International Business School Suzhou is part of Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University and aims to offer a blend of western and Chinese academic practices. Can you tell us a little more about the School, its mission and its values? XJTLU is a joint venture between Xi’an Jiaotong University in China and the University of Liverpool in the UK which began in 2006. As an independent Sino-foreign co-operative university, XJTLU is the first and only of its kind approved by China's
Ministry of Education. IBSS is growing in size and influence in pursuit of its vision to be a leading international Business School. The School’s six core values – Inquisitive, Mindful, Professional, Adaptive, Collaborative and Transformative (IMPACT) – represent IBSS’s positive impact on society through teaching, research, and business engagement. IBSS became the youngest School to be accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) in 2016, and the youngest to receive EQUIS accreditation in 2018. In 2020, IBSS received joint accreditation from AMBA & BGA. As a result, IBSS officially became the world’s 103rd triple- accredited Business School by AACSB, EQUIS, and AMBA. Our five departments of Accounting, Economics, Finance, Intelligent Operations and Marketing, and Strategic Management and Organisations have 150-plus faculty or teaching staff members who teach some 4,000 students from 60 countries. Diverse faculty include top researchers and experienced corporate professionals. With English as the language of instruction, IBSS delivers a range of undergraduate, postgraduate and executive education programmes (including IMBAs and PhDs). Two of our sustainability-related centres are excellent examples of the blending of east and west. The Centre for Responsible and Sustainable Business Education collaborates with multiple Chinese and western stakeholders while the W.E. Leader Mindfulness Centre combines eastern traditional culture with western modern medicine. Congratulations on winning Best CSR and Sustainability Initiative at the AMBA & BGA Excellence Awards 2022. Can you share some insight into your winning initiative, ’15 Ways in 15 Weeks’ (FWFW)? We were absolutely thrilled with this international recognition of FWFW. It was adapted from an Open Educational Resource (OER), the ‘Anatomy of Action’ project, which had been developed in 2019 by the UN’s Environment Programme and the UnSchool of Disruptive Design. For other educators looking to provide quality experiential educational programmes for their students, I highly recommend this time- and energy-saving strategy of customising Creative Commons-licensed materials. With a group of only three students working on the initiative at the beginning of the semester, it was very useful to have the structure and supporting research already available for us. That let us focus on adapting it to meet our organisation’s needs, as well as the actual execution. The IBSS Sustainability Committee and the Sustainable Future Talents really came together as a cohesive team through this experience. I certainly learned many lessons from it that I will carry forward into my practice. Even though I consider myself to be very good at listening to my students, and meeting them where they are in their educational journey, I still grew in these skills as I worked with the different Sustainable Future Talent teams to plan the activities each week. As a marketing practitioner who has organised numerous events and activities over the years, I had ideas for how we
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