Wednesday afternoons during the autumn & spring semesters at eXpression Umeå are usually characterised by workshops in the pre-incubator programme eXpress. This past Wednesday, the workshop was attended by some twenty students from Umeå University and the sustainability organisation Sustainergies.
Sustainergies creates opportunities for students to work with sustainability in practice and in this way contributes to strengthening the sustainability competence of students at Swedish universities and colleges.
During Wednesday's workshop, students from Sustainergies collaborated with entrepreneurs from the pre-incubator programme. By the end of the workshop, individual action plans had been created for each business idea with the aim of contributing to the Global Goals. One of the participating entrepreneurs was Anna Morén.
It has been a very valuable workshop where the students came up with many good ideas on how I and my company can work with sustainability. We discussed, among other things, sustainable choices of raw materials, production and recyclable bottles, says Anna Morén, who is developing the business idea, the entrepreneur behind Björkvodka.
Increasing both environmental and social sustainability in many sectors is a critical societal challenge. Entrepreneurs and their innovations and new businesses are key drivers for transforming industries. Therefore, more entrepreneurs are needed who integrates sustainability in their business by making social and environmental challenges their purpose or incorporating such challenges when addressing other business objectives.
Research shows three key factors for more sustainable businesses are (1) entrepreneurs' attitudes towards sustainability, (2) social norms and (3) perceived control.
Through the workshop with Sustainergies we hope to reinforce the importance of sustainability issues and thus social norms around this. We hope that giving entrepreneurs action plans for working with sustainability will influence their perceived control to actually contribute to this work," says Oskar Riby, programme manager for the eXpress programme.
In addition to the opportunity to deepen knowledge on sustainability, the collaboration between eXpression and Sustainergies serves as a platform to learn from the world of entrepreneurship and the challenges of starting a new business and wanting to work in an environmentally friendly way.
This type of work is a great opportunity for students to broaden their perspectives, inspire and contribute to more sustainable businesses, says Mirella Persson and Sarah Hellström, project managers for Sustainergies in Umeå.
The next step in the collaboration between eXpression and Sustainergies is a workshop between students and companies in the Creatives incubator programme.
