Business for Good
The LMU College of Business Administration aims to “advance knowledge and develop business leaders with moral courage and creative confidence to be a force for good in the global community.” This course is a transformational experience for incoming undergraduate students that begins their journey toward a business degree and beyond, focusing on the role of business as a force for good.
The course is an immersive and interactive experience with the following elements. It involves the major global challenges that you will face in your professional careers, such as poverty and the environment, and brings out the role of business in being a force for good in addressing these challenges as well as in a broad array of issues. It involves a group project where your team will design a business plan to launch a product for low-income (i.e., subsistence) customers in domestic or international markets, while achieving economic sustainability as well as social and environmental sustainability. It involves doing good as being at the heart of the business rather than as corporate social responsibility. And most importantly, it will involve examining your values as it relates to doing good in the professional and personal realms. The course will culminate in a final presentation to internal and external stakeholders. In short, if you are a first-year student you will start out your careers by having all of these challenges to confront right away.
By the end of this course, you should be able to:
1. Understand the needs of consumers in subsistence marketplaces as it relates to new products or services.
2. Develop a plan for a product or service to benefit consumers in subsistence marketplaces to achieve triple-bottom-line outcomes.
3. Assess whether a business is working as a force for good in society.`
4. Reflect on your values as it relates to doing good in the professional and personal realms.
5. Understand and apply the bottom-up approach to enable emergent understanding and design for business for good.
6. Apply the learning from Business for Good to the rest of the curricular and co-curricular experiences at LMU.
These goals are aligned with the four broad learning goals of Loyola Marymount University