Research Projects
Current projects
Arctic Sustainable Resources and Social ResponsibilityThe Thematic Network on Arctic Resources and Social Responsibility offers opportunities for experts and practitioners of all disciplines to share knowledge and interact for sustainability. This may relate to natural resource extraction as well as resource management in a broad sense (including non-exploitation), capacity building, migration, eco-tourism, indigenous knowledge as a resource of significance of its own for sustainable Arctic futures, and a range of other issues.
Read more about the project here.
For more information, please contact Karin Buhmann at kbu.msc@cbs.dk.
AURORAAurora European Universities Alliance
Aurora aims at equipping students with the skills and mindset to help address key societal challenges through social entrepreneurship and innovation. By developing the Aurora competency framework the competencies for social entrepreneurship (also in the broader sense of social innovator or intrapreneur) will be identified and measured.
We are looking for volunteers who want to test this framework in their studies courses. Interested? Please contact us.
Via collaboration of educators and exchange among students social entrepreneurship education will be enhanced with innovative teaching formats (online, blended, face-to-face) and link more the nine European universities. Beside student exchange via Erasmus or as free mover we offer a variety of new formats for students. Students can participate online in electives at Aurora partners, summer university courses, and hackathons or social startup-weekends at CBS or our Aurora partners.
Read more about the project here.
For more information, please contact Kai Hockerts at kho.msc@cbs.dk or Anne-Karen Hueske at ahu.msc@cbs.dk.
BEACONBehavioural insights for a circular society: Using behavioural insights to create an urban food system that fosters sustainable food styles and promotes a circular society
The BEACON project investigates how best to employ measures based on behavioural insights (“nudges”) as part of an effort to shift consumption choices towards more sustainable and resilient options. It focuses on the food system, which is crucial for building resilience and delivering on Sustainable Development Goals, since it is one of the key impact areas as regards climate change and environmental harm. As its specific focus, the present research targets urban food systems an uses the case of Copenhagen as a practice example. The two major behavioural changes it aims to spur are reducing meat consumption and hence environmental and social footprint, and second, reducing food waste, an explicit target within SDG 12. The project is funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation and runs for four years, starting in September 2021.
Project organisation: The project team consists of Lucia Reisch (PI), Efthymios Altsitsiadis (co-PI and WP leader), Jan Bauer (WP leader of the field experimentation) and three scientific experts Meike Janssen, Maria Figueroa, Kristian Roed Nielsen, who work in synergy with the Consumer and Behavioural Insights Group (CBIG), founded by BEACON’s PI.
For more information, please check the BEACON website, contact the research team at beaconproject@cbs.dk and follow the project on LinkedIn.
The project: The ambition of the EU-funded BECoop project is to provide the necessary conditions, technical as well as business support tools, for unlocking the underlying market potential of community bioenergy. The project’s goal is to make community bioenergy projects more appealing to potential interested actors and to foster new links and partnerships among the international bioenergy community across Europe.
The grant: The project is funded by the EU Horizon 2020 Research and innovation programme and runs from November 2020 until October 2023.
For further information, visit the BECoop project website or contact the MSC participants Isabel Froes, ifr.msc@cbs.dk, Efthymios Altsitsiadis, ea.msc@cbs.dk, or Luise Noring, lno.msc@cbs.dk.
Climate Change and Global Value Chains in BangladeshThis research and capacity building project uses cutting-edge social science methods to investigate how the garment/textile value chains connecting Europe and Bangladesh are being reconfigured in response to climate change. Our research project will answer the following research questions:
How are the garment and textile value chains connecting Europe and Bangladesh being reconfigured in response to climate change, and what are the consequences for economic, social, and environmental upgrading in the garment and textile industries of Bangladesh?
The project will create new academic and policy relevant knowledge by developing a conceptual framework that bridges global value chain and climate change analysis.
For more information, please contact Peter Lund-Thomsen at pl.msc@cbs.dk.
Commodifying CompassionToday’s marketplace is inundated with products supporting humanitarian causes that promise to give aid to beneficiaries, provide ‘good feelings’ to consumers and promote the brands of corporations and humanitarian NGOs. The commodification of humanitarianism (turning people and causes into marketable things) is thus linked to the privatization of help (replacing public donors with private philanthropy) with significant and as of yet poorly understood consequences. Commodifying Compassion will explore these dynamics in three different contexts where humanitarianism has been a realm traditionally dominated by the state (Denmark), the church (Italy) and the market (United States). The overall objective of Commodifying Compassion is to understand how ‘helping’ has become a marketable commodity and how this impacts humanitarianism symbolically and materially.
Read more about the project here.
For more information, please contact Lisa Ann Richey at lri.msc@cbs.dk.
covidWISE#covidWISE is a project initiated by Copenhagen Business School (CBS), founded in the autumn of 2020 with the support from the Danish Innovation Foundation. The initiative develops and supports emerging social entrepreneurs with temporary business models, aimed at addressing the economic, social and health consequences of Covid-19. The aim of project is to empower participants to engage in counteracting the consequences of the pandemic. We do this by encouraging them to explore the social and economic problems resulting from the crisis and to identify creative solutions. Particularly, we expect them to create business models providing options for those who have lost their jobs or livelihoods. From this ultimate goal stems the name of our project #covidWISE, which stands for Covid Work Integration Social Enterprises (WISE).
Read more about the project here.
For more information, please contact Kai Hockerts at kho.msc@cbs.dk.
The project examines the role of imagination about digital media for dialogue between multinational companies and social movement organisations. At a time of climate crisis and a focus on companies’ responsibility and sustainability, understanding the potential of digital media for empowering social movement organisations to hold companies to account is crucial. Digital media are often seen as democratising, not least because of their potential to enable social movement organisations to hold companies accountable through online campaigns. But scandals such as the revelation of Cambridge Analytica’s misuse of Facebook users’ data have created uncertainty about what kind of data collection digital media enable, and how data is analysed and used. As a consequence, our imagination about the digital influences our digital actions.
For example, companies’ fear of criticism may make them increasingly focused on collecting data about their critics rather than engaging in dialogue about new paths towards more responsible business. At the same time, social movement organisations’ fear of companies’ surveillance and retaliation may make them refrain from certain kinds of criticism. Online criticism, for instance, has previously resulted in retaliation from the multinational company Nestlé. This project goes beyond these actions and uncovers the imaginaries that underpin companies’ and social movement organisations’ uses of digital media in struggles to define companies’ responsibility at a time of climate crisis.
Read more about the project here.
For more information, please contact Julie Uldam at ju.msc@cbs.dk.
TREEADSA Holistic Fire Management Ecosystem for Prevention, Detection and Restoration of Environmental Disasters. TREEADS aims to build upon state-of-the-art high TRL products and unite them in a holistic Fire Management platform that optimise and reuse per phase the available Socio-technological Resources in all three main phases of Wildfires' control: Prevention & preparedness, detection, post-fire risk factors.
For more information, please contact Efthymios Altsitsiadis at ea.msc@cbs.dk or Isabel Froés at ifr.msc@cbs.dk.
EUSOCIALCIT The Future of European Social Citizenship
The overarching objective of EUSOCIALCIT is to provide scientific analysis and examine alternative policy scenarios that support the European Union’s aim of strengthening EU social citizenship. We will do so by examining, in the context of long-term economic and social transformations as well as the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, four main issues: (i) the rationale for and the nature of EU social citizenship and the social rights associated with it; (ii) the objective state of social rights in the EU, their capacity to mitigate economic shocks, and their relationship to social outcomes such as social inequality, gender inequality, poverty, and precariousness; (iii) the subjective view of EU citizens on the state of social rights and on the role of the EU in providing these rights; and (iv) alternative policy scenarios that lead to the strengthening of social rights and EU social citizenship. Towards these ends, EUSOCIALCIT will develop a synthesis of long-standing debates on the justification and feasibility of stronger EU social citizenship and elaborate a novel, resourcebased and multi-level concept of social rights. We will identify current gaps in the provision of social rights and strategies to fill them, particular in terms of policy scenarios for the EU. The project will create scientific knowledge that can be used by national and European policy-makers to strengthen social rights and EU social citizenship and to foster equality and well-being in our societies.
Read more about the project here.
For more information, please contact Janine Leschke at jle.msc@cbs.dk.
HECAT is a consortium of European Institutes dedicated to understanding big data and algorithm usage within Public Employment Services (PES). The primary aims of this Horizon 2020 funded research is to work towards developing and piloting an ethical algorithm and platform for use by PES and unemployed people to assist with decision making and distribution of meaningful resources.
Read more about the project here.
For more information, please contact Janine Leschke at jle.msc@cbs.dk.
HUMAC focuses on business-humanitarian collaboration in different crisis contexts to understand how humanitarian initiatives that involve private-sector firms can be organized in an ethical, effective, and sustainable manner. In doing so, HUMAC aims to generate urgently needed research-based knowledge and theoretical insights into the organizational dynamics, complications, and solutions of business-humanitarian collaboration.
Read more about the project here.
For more information, please contact Verena Girschik at vg.msc@cbs.dk.
The project aims at comprehending consumers’ personal values, attitudes and purchasing behaviors on beauty and wellness products in the global market place, and at identifying various types of consumer segments that intersect across specific national cultures and the universal global consumer culture.
Accordingly, the project will address three specific challenges:
- Visualize and map-out consumers’ diverse personal value priority patterns across international markets by referencing existing open databases.
- Design a comprehensive questionnaire to analyze relations between consumers’ value priorities, motivations and purchasing behaviors, and eventually identify their decision-making process for purchasing beauty and personal care products.
- Develop a data analytic framework for predicting diverse consumers’ purchasing behaviors of beauty and wellness products.
This international industrial/academic project is fully funded by the Japanese enterprise, KOSE Corporation, and will be conducting a series of intercultural consumer surveys integrating data science, cross-cultural psychology and consumer psychology to map-out and profile various consumer types across markets. The eventual aim of the project is to develop "Intercultural Personas of Beauty & Values".
For more information, please contact Fumiko Kano Glückstad at fkg.msc@cbs.dk.
iPRODUCEiPRODUCE aims to deliver a novel social manufacturing platform to enable multi-stakeholder interactions and collaborations to support user-driven open-innovation and co-creation. The iPRODUCE platform will be deployed in local ‘ecosystems’ (composed of SME associations, manufacturing and specialist SMEs, Fablabs, Makers spaces, and others) under the concept of collaborative manufacturing demonstration facilities (cMDFs).
Read more about the project here.
For more information, please contact Isabel Froés at ifr.msc@cbs.dk.
JPI Policy Evaluation NetworkPEN aims to valuate policy measures promote a healthy diet and physical activity of the population in terms of their content, implementation and effectiveness. The project started in February 2019 as part of the Joint Programming Initiative on a Healthy Diet for a Healthy Life (JPI HDHL). It will run for three years until the end of January 2022.
Read more about the project here.
For more information, please contact Lucia Reisch at lre.msc@cbs.dk.
MOC Making Oceans count in the Nordic financial system (MOC)
The MOC project is aiming to drive Nordic financial service institutions (FIs) towards an increased awareness of how their investment and credit decisions contribute to major Nordic ocean risks. Up to now, FIs have been slow to react to the state of the ocean. However, the financial sector has the opportunity to support healthy oceans via its capital allocation. Whilst data platforms of primary ocean focused data are gaining more extensive knowledge, availability, and quality, the main issue faced by the finance sector is to connect and translate nature-related data into applicable data for their investment activities. Thus, this project deals with creating a link between data providers and FIs, for the latter to assess the magnitude of key ocean pressures and the scale of human activities driving them. This shall facilitate investors to include oceans in carbon accounting and disclosure, which is playing a major role in global carbon cycling.
The project’s theory of change includes a compliance assessment to position oceans on the agenda of FIs. The engagement with ESG data vendors in the form of interviews, roundtables, and events, the project investigates solutions to integrate ocean risk metrics and ultimately provide data that is ready for deployment by FIs to monitor ocean impacts of their financial decisions. This will allow to create a data foundation for practice change towards greater accounting for ocean risks.
Project team: The project team is led by the Green Digital Finance Alliance (GDFA), partnered up with WWF and CBS, represented by MSC Associate Professor Dr. Kristjan Jespersen.
The grant: The project is funded by the Velux Foundation and runs for 2 years (Jan 2021 – Dec 2022).
For further information, please contact Kristjan Jespersen at kj.msc@cbs.dk.
New Partnerships for Sustainability - NEPSUS ProjectNEPSUS assembles a multidisciplinary team to analyze partnerships with kinds and degrees of complexity through structured comparisons in three key natural resource sectors in Tanzania: wildlife, coastal resources and forestry. Tanzania provides an ideal case for researching the impact of new partnerships on sustainability outcomes because policy and program implementation in these three sectors are heavily dependent on their success.
Read more about the project here.
For more information, please contact Stefano Ponte at spo.msc@cbs.dk.
Organizing Multi-stakeholder Initiatives (MSIs) in AsiaThis project focuses on regional organization, multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) and anti-corruption in Southeast Asia. It explores how regional contexts influence the organization and interactions in MSIs. The findings from the study are used to contribute to the discussion on cross-sector partnership, multi-stakeholder initiatives and governance for CSR and the issues of anti-corruption. Results are disseminated through teaching, seminars (academic and practitioner), and research papers.
For more information, please contact Luisa Murphy at lm.msc@cbs.dk.
Focused on Ethiopia and Tanzania, the PACSMAC project will investigate how climate change – and the ways actors across the value chain are trying to adapt to or mitigate it – affect coffee farmers’ livelihoods and land-use decisions. While observers often describe emerging coffee production experiments and the market opportunities they generate as resilient, vibrant, and environmentally beneficial, these assessments are preliminary and speculative. In fact, the opportunities, and incentives for growers to adopt and benefit from any of these innovations will depend on what downstream firms and even consumers do.
PACSMAC will illuminate the connection between smallholders’ opportunities to innovate to improve their livelihoods and firms’ and governments’ efforts to build and profit from global value chains. The project is funded the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark through the Consultative Research Committee for Development Research (FFU) and the Danida Fellowship Centre and will run for five years.
Read more about the project here.
For more information, please contact Kristjan Jespersen at kj.msc@cbs.dk.
PlantPro, funded by Innovationsfund Denmark, aims at fostering the transition towards more plant-rich diets and the avoidance of food waste among consumers in Denmark. It is a collaboration between CBS, Aarhus University, Copenhagen University, and more than ten actors from the Danish food sector.
Read more about the project here.
For more information, please contact Meike Janssen at mj.msc@cbs.dk.
ReNEW will strengthen the awareness, focus and knowledge base at each partner university and raise the potential of posing problem-based research questions concerning the Nordic region. This will enhance the attention payed to the Nordic as a vital cultural, spatial, institutional and economic category, in a global context alongside national and European contexts. ReNEW will institutionalize and combine existing traditions of cross-disciplinary, international and comparative research on the Nordic region. ReNEW will root this tradition closely to established mono-disciplines within each partner university. The key members, with vast experience in Norden related research, will be agents for this process.
Read more about the project here.
For more information, please contact Janine Leschke at jle.msc@cbs.dk.
Read more about the project here.
For more information, please contact Lara Anne Hale at lh.msc@cbs.dk.
Read more about the project here.
For more information, please contact Martin Skrydstrup at msk.msc@cbs.dk.
The Regulation of International Supply Chains (RISC)The project on the Governance of Occupational Health & Safety in the Bangladesh Ready-Made Garment Industry, is led by Copenhagen Business School (Denmark), in partnership with BRAC University (Bangladesh), Tufts University (USA) and the Danish Ethical Trading Initiative (DIEH). A unique approach of the project is that of capacity building, working from the premise that sustainable, systematic change is best accomplished when locally-driven and managed. The findings and evidence from the research will be used both to generate new academic knowledge as well as to formulate practical recommendations for the industry. RISC will also seek to identify and support local organizations to uptake the findings and recommendations via provision of 'micro-grants'. Ab advisory board consisting of leaders from both academia and practice in europe, the US and Bangladesh oversee and guide RISC's work.
RISC Report: Early Impacts of Coronavirus on Bangladesh Apparel Supply Chains
What happens when coronoavirus shuts stores and retailers cancel billions of dollars in clothing orders? The Regulation of International Supply Chains (RISC) team invites you to read their newly-published report on the effects of coronavirus in the Bangladesh apparel industry and its 4+ million workers.
Seven years ago this month, more than 1,100 garment workers in Bangladesh were killed when the Rana Plaza complex collapsed on top of them. Today, the Bangladesh apparel industry and its millions of workers face a new, potentially even more devastating crisis: coronavirus. Health issues aside, the impacts of the global pandemic on the industry and its workers are potentially catastrophic for the industry and wider society alike in a country where, for many workers, unemployment threatens starvation.
The report – aimed at practitioners and policy-makers – seeks to aggregate key information from a variety of sources both local and international, as well as look behind the numbers to reflect on the broader issues and challenges at play.
The report is a product of the RISC project, and brings together researchers from Copenhagen Business School, BRAC University Bangladesh, Tufts University and the Danish Ethical Trading Initiative. RISC is funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Denmark and administered by the Danida Fellowship Center.
Read the full report here.
Risc Flyer
For more information, please contact Jeremy Moon at jm.msc@cbs.dk.
Towards a Sustainable Cruise Tourism Industry: Changing Tourist Behaviour in the Ports of GreenlandOrganisational Communication, Tourist Behaviour and Community Well-being in the Ports of Greenland
The cruise industry is notorious for its questionable ethics and for its negative impact on local communitywell-being. Dramatic images of large cruise ships overshadowing small settlements (particularly in remoteand fragile destinations like Greenland) resonate with the public and make the impact of cruise tourism aregular news issue. This increasingly requires the cruise industry to be held to account. The purpose ofthis project is twofold; the first step is to map, document and understand the current communicativeinterface between cruise ship organisations, cruise ship passengers and local communities. The secondstep is to develop strategies for communication about sustainable tourism that result in tourist behaviourthat not only avoids negative impact on community well-being, but actually benefits both tourists and thelocal community. The project contributes to academia by linking the fields of CSR communication,behavioural economics and sustainable tourism, and thereby advancing emerging research on theapplication of behavioural economics to tourism.
For more information, please contact Elizabeth Cooper at eco.msc@cbs.dk.
Read more about their project here.
For more information, please contact Esben Rahbek Gjerdrum Pedersen at ergp.msc@cbs.dk.
Past projects
Crowdfunding and Sustainable EntrepreneurshipSustainable entrepreneurs and small start-ups face a myriad of challenges in terms of pursuing their sustainably-oriented ventures not least the locked-in nature of the current regime which they inhabit and intend to change; as they often go against existing user and industrial practices, regulation, infrastructure and symbolic meanings. These lock-ins consequently also translate into constrained funding opportunities for these "niche innovators", especially in the early "seed funding" stage as they often perceived as a less attractive investment compared to traditional entrepreneurial ventures. The emergence of crowdfunding could, however, signal a shift in financing opportunities for these small sustainable innovators brought on by a shift in prospective financiers of innovation from professional investors to now ordinary citizens (i.e. crowdfunders). Especially since the early literature on crowdfunding has found that rather than focusing on economic gains and feasibilities, the crowdfunders put much more emphasis on the core values and legitimacy of a project. Leading some scholars to suggest that crowdfunders are more likely to invest in sustainable ventures others, however, question this contention instead noting that there is no positive connection between for example environmental orientation and crowdfunding success. The Post.Doc, therefore, proposes with a mix of methods (see deliverables) to explore the antecedents of both successful and unsuccessful crowdfunding campaigns in efforts to better understand the motivations of crowdfunders to invest in a project. This in order to examine what, if any, potential role the "crowd" could have in driving, financing and enabling sustainable entrepreneurship and innovation.
For more information, please contact Kristian Roed Nielsen at krn.msc@cbs.dk.
For more information, please contact Lucia Reisch at lre.msc@cbs.dk.
The Global Values project aims to develop a comprehensive and innovative framework for assessing the impact that Multinational Corporations (MNCs) have on issues like sustainable development, human rights, transparency and anti-corruption. The project will shed light on institutional arrangements; analyse systems of governance for responsible business practices; explore responsible competitiveness; assess the complementarity of public and private sector activities; and derive recommendations for decision makers in business, policy and NGOs.
For more information, please contact Lucia Reisch at lre.msc@cbs.dk.
Read more about the project here.
For more information, please contact Kristjan Jespersen at kj.msc@cbs.dk.
The project aimed to identify the reasons why young people in Europe eat the way they do and how this influences lifelong health. It was a follow-up study of the large cohort of the IDEFICS children and intends to reassess these families as their children move into adolescence. The project focused on their family environment, socio-behavioural and genetic factors to understand how they drive dietary behaviour of children. The I.Family Study has been coordinated by BIPS (UNIHB). LR led the WP on Consumer Behaviour.
Read more about the project here.
For more information, please contact Lucia Reisch at lre.msc@cbs.dk.
The iPRODUCE project introduces a novel social manufacturing framework that embraces, manufacturing companies in the consumer goods sector, their associations/ networks, fablabs/ makers spaces, DIY communities and various other innovation players at local level. To do so it takes popular and well proven Fab-Lab concepts and makers approaches and installs it in well-connected local multistakeholder ecosystems that are transformed collaborative manufacturing ecosystems thanks to Collaborative Manufacturing Demonstration Facilities (cMDF).
Read more about the project here.
For more information, please contact Kristjan Jespersen at kj.msc@cbs.dk.
The project's objective was to promote systematic change of the Swedish fashion industry that leads to sustainable development of the industry and wider society. The project was divided into 8 research projects: a) recommendations/strategies for different stakeholders how to bring about systematic changes in the fashion industry; b) educational and feedback material for designers regarding design tools; c) shortened time to market introduction of novel textile fibers that are more sustainable than current alternatives; d) some major environmental problems within textile processing industry and use phase of textiles will be solved; e) textile recycling leading to high-value products through dissolution and spinning of new fibers of virgin quality; f) toolbox of communication strategies according to identified target groups; g) suggested framework of policy instruments.
Read more about the project here.
For more information, please contact Lucia Reisch at lre.msc@cbs.dk.
Nudge-itThe Neurobiology of Decision-Making in Eating - Innovative Tools
The Nudge-it consortium aims to develop a strong evidemce base to understand connections between neurobiological data on eating behaviour and the behavioural and economic reasons behins individual food choices. We focused particularty on low SES families and their food choice. Nudge-it developed new tools and experimental approaches to support the integration of behavioural and observational studies with neurobiological studies in a way that can lead to advances in consumer and nutrition research, providing the evidence base needed to educate stakeholders and inform policy.
Read more about the project here.
For more information, please contact Lucia Reisch at lre.msc@cbs.dk.
Trash-2-CashTrash-2-Cash was an EU funded research project which aimed to create new regenerated fibres from pre-consumer and post-consumer waste. It was also pioneering a whole new way of developing materials.
Read more about the project here.
For more information, please contact Wencke Gwozdz at wg.msc@cbs.dk.
UMAMIThe project specifically aims to investigate a main question: How can Chinese tourism to Denmark be increased? It aims to acquire a deeper understanding of tourists from emerging tourist countries (TETC) with special focus on Chinese tourists, by developing a formalized framework that investigates travel motivations, goals as well as mental pictures that TETC tourists have of Denmark as a tourist destination. This approach is accompanied by a complementary analysis of performance drivers of the tourism industry that enables us to measure the competitiveness and growth potential of the Danish tourism industry. Another vital scope is to integrate the aforementioned novel theoretical framework into “a segment-based data collection platform” enabling the intelligent analysis of complex and diverse intercultural segments of potential TETC, by employing state-of-the-art machine learning technologies. This can provide an efficient “segment-specific” communication strategy to attract more TETC tourists to Denmark. The project further proposes a process to tailor Danish tourism offerings to different types of potential TETC. Finally, the project provides insights into the exciting possibility of spill-over effects on Danish exports in the tourist’s home country.
Read more about the project here.
For more information, please contact Fumiko Kano Glückstad at fkg.msc@cbs.dk.