Teaching the Super-wickedness of the Anthropocene: Business Models, Value Proposition and Problematization

This extended abstract accounts for a teaching and learning format enabling business school education to address the super wickedness of the Anthropocene. Previous studies have emphasized the importance of developing formats that teach business students how to approach so-called “wicked problems”, that is, pressing social, economic, and environmental problems that lack simple solutions and cannot be handled in a straightforward planning process. We build on and contribute to this previous work, which has suggested methods for how researchers may collaborate with managers and practitioners to address wicked problems such as inequality, demographic shifts, and sustainable production. In our approach, also situated within a business school framework, we bring together not researchers and managers but business students and working organizations. Likewise, we address not merely wicked but “super wicked problems” and invoke this notion to describe the challenges posed by climate change and the predicament of the Anthropocene epoch as even more vicious than wicked problems. We illustrate our approach, which draws on both business economics, policy science and philosophy, through a specific course format developed at Copenhagen Business School in collaboration with organizational partners from Venice.