Curriculum
This page provides background description on the courses that are taken by CSBP students. The curriculum is still taking shape, so the courses below may change. In addition to the courses listed here, each student will take the common MBA core classes along with the other Oregon MBA students.
A second, critical additional element of the program is that each CSBP student will be in a group that completes a two-term Strategic Planning Project with a company that faces an important sustainable supply chain issue. Conducted in the second year, the CSBP Strategic Planning Projects will represent enhanced versions of the single term projects we've conducted for several years with well-known Oregon companies. They'll also be for projects with a sharper focus on supply chain topics.
Planned Coursework for Sustainble Business Practices MBA Concentration
Perspectives on Nature and Society (Winter, Year One)
- This course consists of a comparative exploration of social science approaches to environmental issues. Its focus is on the interaction of social institutions, culture, politics, and economy with the physical landscape.
Sustainable Business Development (Spring, Year One)
- The purpose of this course is to bring together students from varied backgrounds to appreciate how economic activity impacts the natural environment, to understand the evolution and role of institutions that influence corporate environmental behavior and to learn how a firm can manage its way to better environmental performance. By the conclusion of the course, students will have gained an understanding of how they can assist any organization that they join in responding proactively to the environmental imperatives that it faces.
Supply Chain Operations and information (Spring, Year One)
- Students are exposed to strategic and tactical issues pertaining to the distribution and delivery of products and services. Methodologies and systems for designing, tracking, and managing complex global operations are also a focus of the class. Applications to sustainability will be discussed.
Principles of Industrial Ecology (Fall, Year Two)
- This class features study of key principles related to industrial ecology. Topics include employing a systems perspective that encompasses attention to the life cycle of products, processes, and facilities; adopting a focus on multiple levels of activity (facility, firm, region, supply chain, consumption) and their interactions; utilizing a multidisciplinary approach to analyze industrial metabolism within a social, political, and technological context; and developing key analytic tools for industrial ecology, including materials and energy flow analysis
Project and Operations Management Models (Winter, Year Two)
- This course presents frameworks and solutions for managing complex projects and operations, and for implementing optimal strategies for producing profitable new products and services in the competitive global economy.
Life Cycle Analysis and Reverse Logistics (Spring, Year Two)
- Students in this course will learn about the key elements of these two domains of sustainable supply chain management. They will gain experience in formal life cycle analysis, including establishment of system boundaries, assessment of metric and measures for environmental impacts, and estimation of life cycle properties. They will study concepts of reverse logistics and reviews of viable models in use and study of economic implications of competing models
Environmental and Resource Economics (Recommended for Second Year)
- Topics in this course include study of the appropriate time pattern of harvest for replenishable resources and the appropriate exhaustion of a nonreplenishable resources. Study of issues in natural resource and environmental policies is also undertaken in the course.
Environmental Law for Non-Lawyers (New and in the planning stage)
- In addition to the courses above, we hope to be able to offer this course. It will provide a primer on law for non-lawyers, focusing first on introductions to law and regulation. It will then review United States environmental law, including treatment of the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). International law including the ROHS, WEEE laws in Europe, the Kyoto Protocol and Environmental trade law also will be reviewed.
