January 15 – 21, 2011
Gunter Pauli
This course is part of a three week series Systems Thinking in a Complex World.
Learning how to use systems thinking can be immensely inspiring and constructive for organisations, businesses and other collectives. Indeed, engaging with a whole complex system is essential in working through potential outcomes and dealing with those we cannot foresee. Yet education and training programmes rarely prepare us to operate this way. Therefore, we have to re-learn how we understand the world and our approach to it. This course provides an exciting introduction to systems thinking and its application to sustainability, ecodesign, organisational and social change, industry, business and enterprise with some of the most dynamic theorist and practitioners working in this area.
Click here to book your place online.
How can a systemic view of the world transform the material and social world through a new model of business and enterprise? Gunter Pauli has spent the last five years developing a model called The Blue Economy, which instead of taking profit as its bottom line, is based on collaboration, the generation of social capital rather than debt, and innovations which model ecosystems by cascading nutrients and energy and eliminating waste. His new book describes over one hundred such innovations which have been benchmarked and brought to fruition in different parts of the world. Participants will explore these ideas and how they can relate to their own initiatives.
Gunter will start by introducing the principles on which The Blue Economy is based, and then will look at the interplay of physics, chemistry and biology as the underpinning scientific hierarchy for doing business in systems based on both business cases and science. He will discuss the role of the manager vs the entrepreneur as an opportunity to implement business as a system design, comparing core business, core competences, and supply chain management with how an ecosystem inspired business operates. Finally, he will look at applications of The Blue Economy, particularly in relation to Bhutan, where he is working with the government on developing projects which contribute to the Gross National Happiness as well as generating employment, meeting basic needs and encouraging social cohesion.
Gunter Pauli is a born entrepreneur whose scope of initiatives spans business, culture, science, and education. In 1994 – with the support of the Japanese government and the United Nations University – he launched an initiative to design an economic framework and business model that converts all waste, including emissions, into a value added cascade, modeled on ecosystems. In 2004, he launched a research project identifying the innovations that will shift business towards higher levels of competitiveness and sustainability, while generating millions of jobs through the creation of a platform for entrepreneurship. In early 2010, he will personally direct a two-year initiative that each week for one hundred weeks will present another business model to inspire entrepreneurs to translate these opportunities into worldwide business initiatives. Pauli is the author of seventeen books published in twenty-one languages, and of thirty six fables that bring science and entrepreneurship to children at an early age. His latest book is The Blue Economy: 100 innovations – 10 years – 100 million jobs.
This course is part of a three week series Systems Thinking in a Complex World. Courses in this series are:
Systems thinking and eco-design for sustainability, Hardin Tibbs and Philip Franses (4 – 8 January)
Living and working in a complex world, Jean Boulton, Peter Senge (by videolink), Alex Haxeltine (10 – 14 January)
A Systemic Business Model: Industrial Ecology and the Blue Economy Gunter Pauli (15 – 21 January)
If you take more than one week you will pay less for each consecutive week.
Any One week £750
Any Two weeks £1,450 (Save £50 over weekly course price)
Three weeks £1,900 (Save £350 over the weekly course price)
You can select you the week(s) you require at the point of booking.
All course fees include accommodation, food, field trips and all teaching sessions.
Book your place now! – click here to access our on-line booking system
Book by fax or mail! – click here to find out how
For further information about Schumacher College please see About the College
To provisionally reserve a place for 5 days, email us your contact details and the name of the course admin@schumachercollege.org.uk
We will hold the place for five working days for reservations – three weeks before a course or earlier. After five days we will automatically offer your place to someone else if we have not received your application.
