A joint initiative of Ivey Publishing and the Centre for Building Sustainable Value is reviewing and tagging Ivey teaching cases for their relevance and connections to each of the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This project, a first of its kind in the business case publishing industry, will be making a critical contribution to integrating sustainability measures into management education and the student experience globally.
This comes as world leaders meet this week for the UN General Assembly in New York, where global progress towards the SDGs is being assessed. The SDGs, ratified by all UN Member states in 2015, define 17 goals to end poverty, improve health and education, reduce inequality, and spur economic growth – all while tackling climate change and working to preserve our oceans and forests.
Ivey Professor Oana Branzei, who developed this project and led its implementation, said: “Not only will Ivey’s SDG case tagging make it easier for many faculty to identify teaching cases that integrate multiple sustainability topics, but just as important, will encourage case writers in the future to cover and engage with these issues in new cases.”
Teaching cases are the core of management education at Ivey and other leading business schools. A business case is a description of an actual situation, commonly involving a decision, a challenge, an opportunity, a problem or an issue faced by a person in an organization. Cases are powerful tools for teaching key concepts in the context of management decision-making.
“We are excited about the enormous potential for impact on management education globally,” said David Wood, Executive Director, Ivey Publishing. “We urge faculty and institutions around the world to take advantage of the SDG tagging in the Ivey case library to enhance the integration of sustainability into the thinking and decision-making of future leaders.”
As SDGs are now increasingly being integrated into policy-making and business action for sustainability, the tagging initiative reflects this real-world shift ensuring Ivey’s case collection is organized to meet the critical demands by faculty and globally aware students to integrate the Goals into management education.
As the second largest case producer in the world, Ivey Publishing has been adding a significant number of sustainability focused cases to its collection. In 2021 alone, half of all cases published at Ivey had at least one SDG tag.
Cases can be accessed through the Ivey Publishing website, which includes instructions on how to effectively search using tags. Much of the case tagging work was conducted by Ivey student Bella Pick. You can read more about Bella’s experience of the project and key lessons in this blog piece.
