Newswise — Darden School of Business Professor Andrea Larson has tapped into an efficient and greener way to bring low-cost, high-quality scholarly material on sustainability to instructors and students. Her new textbook, Sustainability, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, is now online at Flat World Knowledge, where instructors can customize and use textbooks that feature a variety of topics. Larson, an expert in the field of sustainability, designed the collection to help instructors teach students about product and service design solutions developed within innovative entrepreneurial ventures in both start-up situations and large companies.
“A new generation of profitable businesses is actively engaged in cleantech, renewable energy and financially successful product system design and supply chain strategies that meet our economic development aspirations while addressing our social and ecological challenges,” states Larson in her book’s introduction. Larson provides frameworks and tools that enable business to re-design according to sustainability principles.
“Through in-depth examination of such sustainability pioneers as Method, Project Frog, Calera, NatureWorks (Cargill) and Frito-Lay, Larson’s book fills a critical gap in the business educator’s tool kit, offering a compelling argument that sustainability must not be presented to future business leaders as a set of expensive obstacles but as an opportunity for innovation and value creation,” according to the textbook’s publisher.
Larson’s efforts were funded by the Batten Institute as part of a desire to create a digital collection of cases and educational materials highlighting cleantech, energy and sustainability innovations.
“This is one of the few sets of integrated teaching material exploring activity at the intersection of entrepreneurial innovation and sustainability concerns,” Larson adds.
Textbooks may be re-arranged to suit an instructor’s syllabus by dragging-and-dropping chapters into new modules. Instructors may even earn royalties for their textbook customizations that become popular.
The web-hosted versions of Flat World Knowledge textbooks are free and always available for anyone to read. Black and white or color printed books are available for a fee. Books also can be downloaded as print-it-yourself PDFs, e-books or audiobooks for mp3 players. Their prices range from $24.95 to $39.95. Individual chapters can be printed for $2.49. The site boasts more than 1,600 faculty users at 1,200 institutions.
For questions or information, contact [email protected].
About the Darden School of Business:
The University of Virginia Darden School of Business is one of the world's leading business schools, offering MBA, Ph.D. and Executive Education programs. The unique Darden experience combines the case study method, the highest-ranked faculty whose research advances global managerial practice and business education, and a tight-knit learning environment to develop principled and complete leaders who are ready to make an impact.
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