Exciting Case Competition with Final Round in Davos 2016

Decarbonize Norway’s sovereign wealth fund
in this year’s Business for a Better World MBA case competition

Team registration is now open for the third-annual CK-Schulich Business for a Better World case competition, a partnership between Corporate Knights magazine and York University’s Schulich School of Business.

With a prize pool in 2015/2016 of $10,000, the final round of this MBA competition will see three top teams present their case analysis in front of a live panel of high-profile judges in Davos, Switzerland, coinciding with the World Economic Forum in January.

Student teams will be asked this year to decarbonize the holdings of the Norway Government Pension Fund Global, the largest sovereign fund in the world with a value of $940 billion (USD). Managed by Norges Bank Investment Management, the fund is commonly referred to as The Oil Fund because it has been built from the surpluses of Norway’s petroleum income. Teams will have four key objectives:

• Minimize the carbon footprint of the fund;
• Reduce risks that might strand assets;
• Maximize returns and engagement impact with companies;
• Position the fund to thrive in and drive a world that does not exceed an average 2-degree temperature increase.

Throughout this competition, students will have access to a tool, designed by Corporate Knights, which will help them assess the carbon profile of the fund’s holdings and allow them to watch this profile change as the holdings mix is altered.

“With our first two competitions, teams were asked to broadly improve the sustainability performance of a case subject. This year, apropos to the lead-up of the Paris climate summit in December, we’re taking a different approach targeted strictly at carbon,” says Tyler Hamilton, editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights. “The case subject will be a sovereign fund worth nearly a trillion dollars. The MBA team that can show the best returns with the lowest portfolio carbon footprint will take the top prize, and send a strong message to investors around the world.”

For more details or to register a team, visit http://www.corporateknights.com/affiliates/2016contest/

The registration deadline is October 16. Case details will be released on October 2, so teams that register early will have an advantage.

Contacts:

Toby Heaps, CEO, Corporate Knights, toby@corporateknights.com

Dirk Matten, Professor, Schulich School of Business, DMatten@schulich.yorku.ca

Julia Shtopel, Schulich MBA student and event organizer, julia.lev1103@gmail.com

About Corporate Knights Inc.

Founded in 2002, Corporate Knights Inc. is a Toronto-based media, research and financial products company focused on clean capitalism. Corporate Knights, the company’s quarterly magazine, was named “Magazine of the Year” in 2013 by the National Magazine Awards Foundation. It is distributed in Canada as an insert inside the Globe and Mail and in the United States inside the Washington Post. With a circulation of more than 120,000, Corporate Knights is one of the most widely read publications devoted to business and sustainability issues. Corporate Knights Inc. is proud to be a certified B Corporation. Visit: www.corporateknights.com

About the Schulich School of Business

Known as Canada’s Global Business School, the Schulich School of Business is ranked among the world’s leading business schools by a number of global surveys. Schulich’s MBA program has been ranked #1 in the world by the Aspen Institute and on the Corporate Knights Global Green MBA Ranking. In Canada, the school has been ranked #1 by Forbes, The Economist and others. The Schulich School is based out of Toronto's York University. Visit: www.schulich.yorku.ca

'Business Education has Become an Industry'

So here we are. As hot as the weather is in New York, as hotly contested is the role which business education has played recently in making for more responsible companies. At the PRME 'side event' of the UNGC Summit some rather soulsearching questions were raised. Rakesh Kurana from Harvard made it quite clear that one of the dilemmas of b-schools in fact is that they have come to see their students rather as ‘customers’ then people who need education and at times been served a diet that needs some acquired taste. Just to blame the business world for lack of demand for issues of CSR and ethics is not enough in a world where the public increasingly worries about the status of wider societal impacts of business.

While the Accenture Study (in cooperation with the UNGC) of the opinion of more than 800 CEOs suggest a slightly different picture, it leaves us with one general problem: Since business education, certainly at postgraduate/MBA level is in fact privatised and ‘purchased’ by students or their companies, this inherent tension cannot be denied. One of the reasons I personally have started to dislike teaching on MBA – or worse – executive MBA – programs is exactly that it is a tough challenge to make students think, reflect about things unknown or strange to them and, most notably, to read. And the issues the UNGC is concerned about fall exactly in this category.

Interesting comments came from India, delivered by Jamshed Irani, Director, Tata Sons Limited. In his view, since business schools don’t do a good job (in general) at talking about climate change, ethics etc. corporations should have their own universities and b-schools. Yes, you havn’t misheard. I guess this reflects a tradition of a great company with a long tradition of philanthropy and ethics, such as Tata. But what about a b-school run by AIG, BP or Lehman Brothers? Just imagine the type of ‘leaders’ we would get from there...

So far the UNGC summit (i.e. this fringe event) put the finger on one important thing: with delegating responsibility for public goods (and education used to be one) in the hand of private actors, we have opened a pandora’s box. Its irreversible, I think (as the Hewlett Packard Chair in CSR, no less). But we need new criteria for private responsibility for public goods in order to change this focus within b-schools. How this will be achieved – no real answers so far from New York.