Cre­at­ing mar­kets for sus­tain­able products

Course content

This course is part of the group of three electives qualifying you for the “CBS cand.merc./M.Sc. Minor in Sustainable Business'.  The course can also be attented without taking the minor.

Entrepreneurship and markets are increasingly seen as plausible sources for solutions to reduce carbon (or other) polluting emissions and economize on the use of limited natural resources. The question is how, and under what conditions, this may be the case? What does it take to make markets shift to new and environmentally more viable products? With the help of analytical concepts from recent material market studies and the new economic sociology, this course provides the students with concepts and methods to understand markets (products, consumers and whole new market arrangements) for sustainable products as practical achievements. Students will learn to understand and analyze how sustainable products and processes are facilitated or hindered by the existing technical infrastructure, the regulative arrangement, the construction of value, and networks between corporations, regulators, consumers, social movements, claims to legitimacy, and the frames of knowledge used to construct and evaluate a particular market regime. In the context of bringing new sustainable goods/technologies to the market, innovation is not only about heroic entrepreneurs, but depends on transforming existing technologies and enrolling a long list of unglamorous characters including calculative tools, new practices of valuation, standards, trials and tests, and the human and non-human participants in chains of production and commercialization. 

The course supports NN3, NN6 and NN7.