Grossman School of Business

Viable Sustainability:
The Center for Sustainable Enterprise

Bringing economic activity in line with environmental and societal issues is among the greatest opportunities we face in addressing the global climate crisis and social inequalities. UVM believes that the fastest way to encourage businesses and communities to make ecologically and equitably sound decisions is for those decisions to also make good economic sense. The flagship for this drive is the UVM Center for Sustainable Enterprise, which develops profitable business models to address our grand societal and environmental challenges.

The Center’s core research and teachings build on the existing faculty strengths in the Grossman business school and the emerging innovation of other UVM colleges—bringing institutional resources to bear on new frameworks for sustainability focused development in the business processes: sustainable and social entrepreneurship, organizational transformation, impact investing, sustainable supply chains, sustainable marketing, poverty reduction and capacity building at the base of the pyramid, social and environmental accounting, and ESG finance are all housed within a sustainability framework.

The Center will support and incubate sustainable organizations, positioning UVM as a leader in programs that educate students with leadership skills in building sustainable business models, processes, products, and services. It will contribute to environmentally and socially sustainable communities and economies and generate knowledge in this area through faculty and graduate student research and collaboration with industry and other stakeholders.

UVM faculty and students will foster and bring together world-class excellence in research, programs, and community outreach at the Center.

UVM believes that the fastest way to encourage businesses and communities to make ecologically and equitably sound decisions is for those decisions to make economic sense today.

Sustainability Video Spotlight

An Interdisciplinary Approach to Business

The business of sustainability can best be promoted through leveraging all of UVM’s institutional resources for understanding how the world functions, through incorporating the expertise of the liberal arts and the hard sciences in our business knowledge.

The Center for Sustainable Enterprise places its foundation on robust programmatic ground. UVM’s Sustainable Innovation MBA was lauded as the #1 Green MBA by Princeton Review in 2020. UVM’s Better World MBA is a top contender for the highest-ranked in the world, with only Oxford as the main competitor. Despite these accolades, the Center’s three goals are not programmatic in nature but instead based in creating scalable impact.

The Center first seeks to build a critical mass of faculty doing interdisciplinary research on existing thematic focuses at the Grossman School of Business. The business of sustainability can best be promoted through leveraging all of UVM’s institutional resources for understanding how the world functions, through incorporating the expertise of the liberal arts and the hard sciences in our business knowledge.

The second goal is for the Center to host graduate students to build the next generation of business and economic leaders. The Center will develop a doctoral program to support the brightest and most driven graduate students to bring their innovative research concepts to UVM.

Finally, the Center will focus on outreach by bringing the functional work of sustainable enterprise to the local, state, regional, and global community. The Center wants to bring this work to institutional forums and to the business community at large. Already the Grossman School of Business is leading this work via several hundred practicums completed by its students with Vermont, US and Global Companies, via cutting edge research published in top journals by its faculty, by hosting global forums of sustainable family businesses around the world, via its graduate and undergraduate programs and online sustainable enterprise certificates.

Highlights of UVM’s Scalable Work in Sustainable Enterprise

Princeton Review Ranks Grossman as #2 Green MBA

Undergrad Interdisciplinary Theme of Sustainable Business

Family Business Sustainability Forums

The Only Way Forward: Multigenerational Collaboration for a Sustainable Future