Sustainability Skills Online II

Status

completed

Summary

The core of the presented project is the sustainable economy qualification program "Sustainability Skills for Founders - The Online Course for Sustainability Skills" www.sustainability-skills.at

This program is a modular, web-based tool which enables founders to rethink, plan, and put into practice their ideas according to the principles of sustainability and thus successfully place their business into an economical context. To enable linkage and integration the course builds on existing founding programs and supplements them: Business skills (such as finance, marketing and law) and soft skills are supplemented by taking into account economical, ecological and social aspects thus illustrating the larger context. Businesses gain not only unimagined innovation potentials but also crucial competitive advantages.

The main goal of the project is to successfully use the sustainability skills online tool to

• establish entrepreneurship and sustainability in a scientific discourse and thus in training and teaching of future founders,
• show and make accessible concrete usability scenarios for Sustainable Entrepreneurship and Entrepreneurial Sustainability in founding qualification and
• help founders to find the undiscovered potentials of their own ideas and benefit from them in their own businesses

To achieve these goals the following measures were realized:

• The sustainability skills online course has found broader and easier accessible application through support of founding institutions.
• Possible acceptance und integration problems were detected with the support of relevant scientific expertise and the results were used for further development and improvement of the usability of the course concerning founding institutions.
• Further adaption of the sustainability skills online course with regard to the needs of the users was realized as well.

To be emphasized within these measures is the involvement of all relevant target groups, namely entrepreneurship- and sustainability-experts within the areas of science and research, founding institutions and training facilities, management consultants specialized in sustainability and last but not least founders.

The results of the project are:

• Support-tools in the form of workshops and documents for institutions which are offering the online course for the first time.
• Experts-pools in the field of sustainability skills in six Austrian regions (Vienna/Lower Austria, Graz/Leoben, Linz/Upper Austria, Klagenfurt/Villach, Salzburg and the Tyrol/Vorarlberg), which are at disposal for future unassisted performance of the course.
• Valuable confirmation and some new suggestions regarding the usability of the course.
• Verification of the optimizing effect of the course within founding processes regarding ascertainment, planning, efficiency and external presentation.
• Information regarding future distribution and implementation of the course.
• A general improvement of the Sustainability-Skills Online Course through the compilation of founding-oriented real life examples within all modules as well as the implementation of the suggestions for the improvement of the course that were identified in the evaluation.

The running time of the project has been March 2006 to December 2007.

Project management

Undine Dellisch
Alumniverband der Universität Wien

Project or cooperation partner

• Stenum Unternehmensberatung und Forschungsgesellschaft für Umweltfragen mbH
• SERI Nachhaltigkeitsforschungs und -kommunikations GmbH
• CSR Agentur Neureiter

Undine Dellisch
Alumniverband der Universität Wien
Maria-Theresien-Str. 3/1, 1090 Wien
Tel.: +43 1 4277 28004
Fax: +43 1 4277 9280
E-Mail: dellisch.alumni@univie.ac.at
Internet: www.alumni.ac.at, www.uniun.at