The MSM full-time MBA and Master in Management students participated in the yearly MSM SDG Challenge. The mission of the SDG-Challenge is to connect and mobilize students and organizations to work together on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations (UN). These goals are set to combat climate change and to reduce the inequalities in the world. On Wednesday, 25 May 2022 the teams pitched their solution in front of a jury.
This year MSM was honored to have the following companies on board, for which the student teams provided a solution to their sustainable business challenge: Lemonaid, Stork, Prodapt, Weir Minerals and the Municipality of Maastricht. The challenges of the companies included:
Lemonaid
Lemonaid has a set of goals and is clear in its ambitions. In addition to the projects that Lemonaid supports, and the fair supply chain that is driving the company, Lemonaid has the ambition to empower their end-consumers to take action on the same goals they have. The challenge therefore was: how can Lemonaid activate the end consumers of their product to take action? What does Lemonaid need to do/set in place for end consumers to reach their goals?
Municipality Maastricht
Recently, a zero measurement has been done regarding the SDGs in Maastricht. The challenge of the municipality of Maastricht included an analysis and prioritizing which actions can be taken by the Municipality in order to make impact on the SDGs.
Prodapt
As a technical company, how can we attract a more diverse workforce and how can we keep them in?
Stork
Create a simple and effective program for Stork Europe to improve circularity and reduce waste in our workshops.
Weir Minerals
How can we enable our own employees (Weir engineers) to have more knowledge about the sustainable practices of Weir? How can they use this information in their projects?
To get to know the companies and receive more information about the challenge all teams visited the company on the so-called Sprint Day. Dinesh Chelattil, current full-time MBA student and working with his team on the SDG-challenge of Stork, summarized the day as an amazingly fun and engaging experience for the team. “We worked collaboratively as a team utilising our range of collective experiences and skills to understand, evaluate and provide solutions that addressed the problem areas and issues. We had the opportunity to use not only our technical skills but also our soft skills to work through the issues at hand. As a team we are very happy to have had the opportunity to work as Sustainability Consultants to resolve a real organisational SDG Challenge.
Dinesh also highlighted the most valuable learning outcome whilst participating in the MSM SDG Challenge. “Our solution was based on the 5s methodology, but our biggest learning outcome was to have discovered the importance of employee engagement and feedback for any organisational change implementation processes. During the ideation process and over numerous meetings, we engaged with Stork’s team to utilise design thinking and collaborated over a great deal of data and information sharing to take the employees into account.”
The student team working together with Stork was announced the winner by the jury. All companies really valued the solutions which the student teams provided for the sustainable business challenges and look forward to implementing them.
The SDG-Challenge is a platform of Soapbox and aims to trigger students to pursue a career in making the world more future-proof and to make organizations use the solutions to “sustainalize” their business.
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