Michael Gibbert – författare

How do universities tackle wicked sustainability challenges faced by society?

The Wicked Learning Workbook is a toolkit for setting up and running an interdisciplinary master-level course in the context of real-world problems such as food waste and loss. The book offers a new pedagogical approach that we call ''wicked'' because it is unorthodox, ambitious, and tackles complex problems that won’t go away. The pedagogy is also international at the course level rather than the conventional exchange semester, enabling institutions to embed international approaches to their core teaching.

The Wicked Learning Workbook speaks directly to academics who are looking for solutions that provide stimuli for research and teaching while giving students an innovative, international learning experience. The approach develops student understanding of the UN Sustainable Development Goals as broad-scale societal issues which are difficult, if not impossible, to ‘solve’. An important outcome of this approach is the laboratory-style classroom that creates opportunities for faculty, students and companies to co-create solutions that are immediately implementable. The resulting methodology is based on industry–university collaboration (such as IKEA and Nestlé). The methodology is of interest to corporate leaders pursuing sustainability goals and business transformation.

Achieving sustainability requires cross-boundary, cross-disciplinary, experimental approaches that allow for scalability. Wicked problems can only be tackled with wicked solution approaches.

How do universities tackle wicked sustainability challenges faced by society?

The Wicked Learning Workbook is a toolkit for setting up and running an interdisciplinary master-level course in the context of real-world problems such as food waste and loss. The book offers a new pedagogical approach that we call ''wicked'' because it is unorthodox, ambitious, and tackles complex problems that won’t go away. The pedagogy is also international at the course level rather than the conventional exchange semester, enabling institutions to embed international approaches to their core teaching.

The Wicked Learning Workbook speaks directly to academics who are looking for solutions that provide stimuli for research and teaching while giving students an innovative, international learning experience. The approach develops student understanding of the UN Sustainable Development Goals as broad-scale societal issues which are difficult, if not impossible, to ‘solve’. An important outcome of this approach is the laboratory-style classroom that creates opportunities for faculty, students and companies to co-create solutions that are immediately implementable. The resulting methodology is based on industry–university collaboration (such as IKEA and Nestlé). The methodology is of interest to corporate leaders pursuing sustainability goals and business transformation.

Achieving sustainability requires cross-boundary, cross-disciplinary, experimental approaches that allow for scalability. Wicked problems can only be tackled with wicked solution approaches.

In a crisis, the business landscape is neither stable nor predictable, resources are scarce rather than abundant, customers disappear and shareholders revolt, all of which can make prediction and control very difficult. Drawing on evidence from philosophy, and on a multi-year case study of a major multinational, Michael Gibbert points to three different kinds of imaginations and proposes a three-step model for imaginative strategy making.

Introducing new topics on this subject, Strategy Making in a Crisis will strongly appeal to top-level managers, including corporate development departments, and business-unit level strategy. Postgraduate students will also receive ideas for their own theses, not only from the content, but also from the approach - which is deductive and integrates management theories using social science literature - and methodology.

This book defines innovation as both a problem and a problem-solving process. It allows readers to approach innovation as a straight-forward problem solving process, and teaches them the paired constraint process to solve specific innovation problems. The authors have used their experience working in creative industries, combined with their academic perspective to create a formal, teachable tool for solving innovation problems. This consists of a formal structure (the problem space), a functional strategy(the paired constraints) and process. (solution by substitution). This book provides a practice section, allowing anyone interested in solving the problem of innovation to learn and develop their skills.