Sustainability Certificate
Transform Organizations, Markets, Communities
At MIT Sloan, we believe that there is a fundamental alignment among healthy businesses, healthy environments, healthy societies, and an economy that serves human needs. Realizing that possibility, however, requires that we transform organizations, markets, and communities. While today’s business models have generated unforeseen levels of economic growth and technological innovation, they have also generated severe strains on our environment, social systems, and personal lives.
The Sustainability Certificate empowers students to take on this transformation by building upon MIT’s distinguished accomplishments in technology, science, and social science, its tradition of interdisciplinary collaboration, and the ideal of Mens et Manus (mind and hand). The overarching goal of the Sustainability Certificate is to build a community of innovators. We want our graduates to be capable of deploying new management practices, business models, and market infrastructures, as well as technologies, that make more effective and sustainable use of natural and human resources, and advance human welfare.
The courses in the Sustainability Certificate program tap into MIT Sloan’s strengths in process improvement, organizational learning and adaptation, entrepreneurship and commercialization, the dynamics of organizational and social change, and the interactions of markets, firms and organizations, while connecting to MIT’s strengths in science and technology. The certificate must be earned in conjunction with an MIT Sloan degree; it is not a stand-alone, non-degree program.
* Students may only pursue one Track at a time but may pursue a Track and a Sustainability Certificate concurrently. There is enough flexibility and overlap that the latter is more than doable.
“I love being in a place that is such a nexus of people and ideas — people coming to learn something new and to define themselves. Being a part of that process is a real honor and a real gift.”
“You could talk about watershed management and conservation of energy all you want. But until you put numbers to it and financial analysis to it, you’re not going to get much done. I came to business school to speak that language, speak with people in terms of numbers, financial numbers so that I can get projects done.”
"After we gave our recommendations, the great part was that the very next day the CEO was in the boardroom implementing them with his top vice presidents."
“One of the reasons I came to Sloan was because I wanted to be at a top MBA institution worldwide. But I also wanted access to working with the latest innovations and the highest technology that was coming out of the MIT labs.”
“Our mission, along with the mission of MIT Sloan, is to both develop leaders who make a difference in the world, and also to make a contribution to thinking about the topic of leadership.”
“[The India Lab] program is one of the reasons I came to Sloan. ... The hands-on learning that MIT offers was a huge differentiator.”
“I knew about American business, but not enough about what’s really become a global economy. … You can read about it all you want, but there’s no substitute for being there and seeing the context and seeing how completely different these [other countries] are.”
“Because of the diversity of our backgrounds, when we hit the ground in Tanzania it almost was a natural play where different people assume different roles.”
“It was really rewarding that they wanted to know what we thought. We left there being fairly certain that they will do some of the things that we suggested.”
“At MIT Sloan you have a lot of opportunities to explore entrepreneurship. Especially in a place like Kampala where you have a lot of development, entrepreneurship can be very exciting.”
“The conditions in the neighborhoods we were visiting were different than what we realized before getting there. Beyond that, what was surprising was that there weren’t surprises!”
“We’re very interdisciplinary. Among the faculty in the group are an economist, a political scientist, a sociologist, and an industrial relations specialist. We’ve always made a big effort to be open to a variety of perspectives, but also to go beyond being open to them, to want to bring them in, because it makes for a richer environment.”
“I can honestly say that when I was planning on coming to business school I never thought that witnessing the birth of a child would be included in the education. It was definitely an experience.”
“For 35 years, we’ve been studying how companies get value from information. … We try to help organizations take a more holistic view of what they are trying to do.”
“By training tomorrow’s leaders to manage the risks of the financial system effectively and ethically, we’ll have a fighting chance of surviving even the largest crises.”
