2024
PIR Working Groups
In line with BI’s mission of shaping people for a more sustainable future and the commitment to United Nations Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME), BI NORWEGIAN BUSINESS SCHOOL (BI) in Norway has reformed all 15 full-time bachelor programmes, to systematically include sustainability and ethics in the mandatory curriculum. Top management gave the mandate in 2020, BI used a project for implementation, and faculty reformed their own courses. BI students and alumni were consulted and contributed their positions.
From Fall 2023, all new bachelor students have sustainability topics in their mandatory courses such as economics, marketing, HR, finance, accounting and ‘Doing sustainable business’ (strategy). In addition they can choose specialized sustainability topics in their majors and electives. As of 2026, 5000 new Bachelor graduates annually will start their careers with a significant higher level of sustainability-competence.
The revised introductory course in Economics course, for example, was taught to 6000 new bachelor students on four campuses, in 16 different classes with 12 lecturers. They used freely available open source materials from the Webpage Core Econ. CORE Econ’s vision is that a radically transformed economics education can contribute to a more just, sustainable, and democratic world.
From 2025/26 on, the new ‘Doing sustainable business’ course will train 4-5000 students using real-life sustainability cases from BI’s business partners. It will be taught on four campuses by some 70 lecturers/facilitators. BI is currently working on the scope and scale challenges, balancing the applied learning goals with cost efficiency and faculty resources.
BI hopes to inspire other business schools and universities to move from the "easy option” of adding electives or extracurricular activities, to the "hard option" of systematically integrating sustainability into the core curriculum while at the same time innovating its contents.