Online and connected: Creating a Sustainable Campus using Apps (Part 3) – Business Schools

In this series of blogs focusing on using apps to help make the campus more sustainable, we have looked at a range of resources from increasing efficiency to making your travel plans more sustainable. In this last part we look specifically at the Business School and how it could benefit from exploring the potential of apps and their use in creating more sustainable campuses and more responsible leaders.

Many of the apps currently available for MBA students are aimed at helping them be better students. There are countless apps like this. AlarmClock helps them get up in time for class. GroupMe helps study groups organize a time and a place to get together to work. ITranslate has voice conversion and dictionaries for a range of languages to help students get through their language classes or speak with fellow classmates. LinkedIn app helps students network.

There are also a handful of business schools, such as Columbia Business School, who are producing new aps that help prospective students go through the application process. Other schools have apps that help students understand the range of services on campus. INSEAD has developed three apps, Life@Insead enables staff and students to find and rate information on life around the campus, INSEAD Institutional app provides information about what is happening on campus in real time and Mobile Connect is an app specifically for INSEAD Alumni.

The next step is for business schools to look at developing a range of apps that focus on enabling their particular campus to move forward in sustainability.

• Apps that help to embed sustainability into teaching by providing a range of links, videos, papers or discussion board to start or continue discussions based on the topic.
• Apps that brings together the range of different sustainability projects, programmes, courses, events on campus with a calendar that allows students to schedule which ones they want to take part in and make suggestions.
• Companies such as SAP are looking at how employees can see the ecological footprint that they have at work, compare it with others at work and find ways to reduce it. Why not create something similar for students and staff on campus?
• Apps for students to know what is happening on campus in terms of sustainability, what they can do to take part and give them the chance to provide inputs and rank sustainability initiatives.
• Apps to share results of sustainable related research or surveys undertaken by the university in order to make them accessible to a larger audience.
• Business schools can also look at organizing their own “hackathons” to develop apps. These are events where computer programmers and graphic designers come today for a day or a weekend to create new apps.

What apps do you use in your business school? Have you developed any apps to help drive your sustainability efforts? Share your experiences in the discussion board.