Building an Industry-Oriented Business Sustainability Curriculum in Higher Education

Mei-hui Chen, Yenchun Jim Wu and Kune-muh Tsai
Additional contact information
Mei-hui Chen: Department of Cosmetics Science, Chia-Nan University of Pharmacy and Science, Tainan 71710, Taiwan
Yenchun Jim Wu: Graduate Institute of Global Business and Strategy, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei 10645, Taiwan
Kune-muh Tsai: Department of Logistics Management, National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology, Kaohsiung 824, Taiwan

Sustainability, 2018, vol. 10, issue 12, 1-14

Abstract: In the past, research addressing the issues reflecting industrial needs for sustainability-related curriculum design in higher education has been limited. To narrow this gap and to provide students with better business sustainability curricula, we propose employing a mapping concept to extract the opinions and needs of industrial professionals. A total of 14 industrial professionals were invited to brainstorm on topics of business sustainability to be included in the curriculum, and we were able to obtain 52 topics. The participants were then asked to group the topics on the basis of their own perception of similarity, and rated their importance and difficulty levels. To associate the topics into clusters, we conducted multidimensional scaling and hierarchical cluster analysis. We achieved five clusters: resource usage reduction and management, corporate governance and labor safety, business sustainability practices, employee rights and community involvement, and knowledge of the regulations. A derived importance–performance analysis (dIPA) was later implemented to further categorize the topics on the basis of the distinct levels of importance and difficulty of each topic. The four quadrants in dIPA could act as guidelines for designing a series of progressive courses on business sustainability in higher education.

Keywords: industrial needs; concept mapping; importance–performance analysis; business sustainability curriculum; higher education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/12/4698/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/12/4698/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:10:y:2018:i:12:p:4698-:d:189391

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().