Strategic Design for Business and Societal Impact

The elective Strategic Design for Business and Societal Impact is a course about proposing, creating, and capturing value for and with a wide range of stakeholders, whether these are companies, government, academic institutes, citizens, or animals and plants. Focusing on a real-life case from practice, it provides you with an understanding of how business models, interorganizational collaborations, and entire ecosystems revolve around the proposal, creation and capture of different types of value, and how to design for this. In this course, we connect how to make money from the perspective of a single organization with how to realize value for society in line with the values you hold. The course builds on knowledge from Understanding Organizations and Understanding Values. 

The course content consists of two main parts (see Figure 1), which you will work on with a group of 3-4 students. Part 1 covers the proposal, creation and capture of value from the perspective of a single organization, drawing on business model design knowledge and tools. Each student group focuses on a particular type of organization (i.e., business, government, knowledge, societal, or nature/environmental). Part 2 addresses the joint proposal, creation and capture of value with multiple organizations, using stakeholder, joint value creation, and ecosystem innovation theory and tools. Here, student groups discuss and negotiate together, simulating how joint value creation works in practice. The groups will be formed based on your own interests during the first introductory session of the course.