The vision of PRME is clear: transform business and management education, research and leadership globally, while promoting awareness about the Sustainable Development Goals, and developing the responsible business leaders of tomorrow. TUM School of Management has been a PRME signatory since 2015. In April, we already introduced our latest PRME report here. Over the years, we realized that we needed to start assessing the impact and effectiveness of our measurements to implement greater sustainability in a more systematic and quantitative manner: Today we present to you our new PRME Office.

The PMRE-Office: (from left) Dr. Mattia Marchesini, Prof. Gunther Friedl, Dr. Christina Green, Prof. Frank-Martin Belz and Esther Salvi.

Responsible Management Education at TUM School of Management

PRME stands for Principles for Responsible Management Education – a platform bringing educational sustainability to over 800 business and management schools worldwide, including the TUM School of Management. Being part of the Technical University of Munich allows us to benefit from a multidisciplinary environment and to be part of a holistic strategy that serves as a roadmap for our sustainability journey. We are committed to shaping an ethical, responsible and sustainable education for the leaders of tomorrow and keep reporting our PRME-related activities with great pride.

A Clear Strategy to Boost Our Sustainable Impact

After qualitatively analyzing our PRME-related efforts for the past five years, the need for us to start collecting relevant data in more detail became increasingly evident in 2020. That is why, since the beginning of this year, we’ve been focusing on that with our newly established PRME Office: With an in-depth analysis of our teaching and research activities and by monitoring the dialog with both internal and external stakeholders, the PRME Office defines a clear strategy for boosting the sustainable impact of our institution. “Our goal is to educate our students to be sustainable leaders of tomorrow,” PRME Sustainability Assistant Esther Salvi explains. At the moment, the team is running two project studies with students who are collecting systematic information about sustainability in our teaching modules. “The aim is to develop a tool to analyze the sustainability of our modules both qualitatively and quantitatively,” Mrs. Salvi continues.

Led by our Dean and PRME Office Director, Prof. Dr. Gunther Friedl, the taskforce is composed of five additional team members – each filling a different position. “We work very closely with each other,” says Mrs. Salvi who supports the PRME Sustainability Manager Prof. Dr. Frank-Martin Belz during her doctoral studies at the Chair of Corporate Sustainability. While the PRME Office Director Prof. Dr. Friedl is the reference person regarding long-term strategic decisions related to the school’s sustainability, Prof. Dr. Frank-Martin Belz is responsible for the short- and medium-term strategy. As the holder of the Chair of Corporate Sustainability, Prof. Dr. Belz has been teaching and conducting international as well as interdisciplinary research on sustainability innovation and marketing at TUM for 18 years now.

“I coordinate the data collection and sustainability assessment of research and teaching at TUM School of Management,” the PRME Sustainability Assistant explains. Together, she and Prof. Dr. Belz write the PRME Report. Additionally, Dr. Christina Green is responsible for the PRME Quality Management. Assisted by Dr. Mattia Marchesini, Dr. Green takes care of the school’s AACSB re-accreditation and examines how the students rate sustainability, responsibility and ethics in teaching. All PRME communication matters are settled by Claudia Ferringo. According to Mrs. Salvi, the PRME Office is currently planning to expand: “We want to include more people who could contribute to enhance the value of our sustainable activities and strategy.”

For now, the six heads of our PRME Office shape our sustainability strategy with the aim of tackling the grand societal challenges and transmitting our core values and purpose to the sustainable leaders of tomorrow: our students. The complete report on our 2019 – 2020 activities is available here.

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