People, Planet & Profit

The focus of the module Project management for change is on theories and approaches relevant to project management for social change. You will develop a basic understanding of the theories underpinning the paradigm of social change. In addition, you will learn to identify and distinguish between the following approaches: social marketing for social and behavioural change, social innovation, and advocacy and mobilization.

This module offers you a space to reflect, analyze and generate insights about the practice of project management as applied to social change projects. You will develop the skills and attitudes needed to develop successful social change projects, guided by innovative, agile and participatory approaches.

As a future project manager, you need to be able to substantiate your project plans with relevant applied and evidence based research. In order to do this, you will need to gather materials and evidence using various research methods and data collection techniques. In addition, the skills that you will use in these methods and techniques are necessary to create deliverables that meet clients' needs.

This module focuses on how objectives of ‘good governance’ can contribute to sustainable development, and which actors are involved in these processes. Good governance is increasingly included as a prerequisite condition in frameworks of bilateral cooperation, as well as in the projects and institutional structures of those corporations working within an international setting. It is therefore important that project managers and consultants working within these sites, are able to identify, compare and analyze aspects of governance and sustainable development.

However, sustainable development not only relies on indispensable conditionalities such as political will and availability of resources. It also requires the absence of compromising factors such as violence, corruption and unauthorized use of legitimate power. To facilitate understanding of these obstructing aspects, students will analyse case studies – on for example environmental pollution, violence, human trafficking or migration – in order to discuss and expose such underlying threats, limitations and ethical dilemmas that hamper processes of sustainable development.

Globalization and its effects are an ongoing debate. The aim of this module is to enable you to engage with globalization as a complex concept by providing you with an important overview of the main issues, facts and theoretical debates relating to globalization, from a historical and geopolitical perspective.

Globalization inspires supporters and critics. We will look at both sides of the story to let you develop your own opinion about globalization and its effects. Because we want you to develop a critical understanding of the political and geographical dimensions of complex globalization processes, you will explore a selection of cross-disciplinary literature (culture, economy, development, gender). We will look at how globalization has transformed our ways of understanding the world as economic and political structure. Discussion will include the effect of globalization on space/power correlations in urban settings; shifting scales of political spheres of influence, the challenge of globalization for the nation-state concept, state sovereignty and national identities, etc. Main definitions of the concept will be discussed to try to understand the roots of globalization.

You will, in a business team, develop a business plan for a new sustainable business (idea) or social enterprise. To support the development of a sound plan, you will learn to:

• Apply different approaches to sustainable business challenges.
• Identify, deal with and evaluate the consequences of certain business decisions for stakeholders and the environment.
• Apply the acquired knowledge and skills to a real-life sustainability-related business challenge.

Your team needs to select a challenge first before investigating the most sustainable and commercially viable business solution. To conclude this module, you and your team members will write a full business plan for the (new) social enterprise and present it in a pitch to a panel of external business specialists.

The course Marketing provides you with the fundamental concepts associated with the function and practices of marketing.

Major topics of discussion will include:

• What is the marketing function within organisations?
• How do organisations build relationships with their customers?
• What does the decision making process of customers look like?
• How to use the marketing mix to achieve organisational objectives?
• What is the role of marketing research in marketing?
• What are effective ways to segment a market and to approach customers in these segments?

You will be trained to become economic naturalists, people who analyse real-world problems using the seven economic principles (scarcity, cost-benefit, incentive, comparative advantage, increasing opportunity costs, efficiency and equilibrium). In the module, these principles will be put to work to explain human behaviour, and the overall outcomes in terms of markets, distribution of resources, and welfare. Building on these principles, you will learn to use tools such as elasticities, marginal analysis and simple economic models to assess the effects of changes to economic systems.

Complete your exchange semester or year by taking one or more electives. The module Introduction to Windesheim is compulsory for all international students, but you are free to choose from the other options. You will receive ECTS credits when you complete a module successfully. 

Introduction to Windesheim
Intercultural Awareness
Drama and Improvisation
Dutch Language
Dutch Society

Develop yourself into a ‘culturally intelligent’ professional through deepening your understanding and awareness of (cultural) differences and processes of inclusion and exclusion, as well as through training your skills to manage diversity and inclusion. Cultural differences must be interpreted broadly and include, amongst others, national, regional, ethnic, gender and age differences. 

International project managers and consultants will come across many different situations of intercultural interaction. It is important to develop behavioral skills that enable you to reflect on these cultural issues and make decisions from an inclusivity perspective. Therefore, social and psychological theories about how inclusionary and exclusionary practices come about will be discussed. Throughout the course, you will work on a portfolio in which different products should be presented.

This module exposes you to key concepts and aspects of the non-profit sector and civil society. It gives you a first look at the key duties and responsibilities of non-profit managers and leaders.

Key topics are:

• Understanding the non-profit sector and non-profit management as a discipline
• Governing and leading non-profit organizations
• Managing non-profit organizations
• Obtaining and managing resources

Subtopics include:

• Theories of the non-profit sector and non-profit management
• Overview of global civil society
• Boards and executive leadership
• Strategic planning
• Resource development

Besides this, you will explore specialized topics, such as social entrepreneurship and global NGOs.

Management of environmental and social impacts is becoming increasingly important in the global business world. More and more corporations therefore demand leaders who understand these issues and can deliver results. They need people who can turn the environmental and social issue from barriers into business opportunities.

This module analyzes mechanics and context of topics such as economic development, pollution and intergenerational justice. It introduces the foundations of environmental economics, resource economics and welfare economics.

The Emergent futures module is inspired by the framework of the 7 Revolutions and will give insight in the most advanced and promising innovations for each revolution. We challenge you to go in depth by discussing possibilities of the emergent future in relation to the SDGs and concepts they have previously learned in global challenges.

You will be confronted with emerging research and relevant information that gives us an idea of what the future may look like. We challenge you to think like visionaries and be able to envision, based on current trends and research, what the possible realities may be.

Each class will include time for discussion on different topics, recent research published around the themes, etc. At the end of the lesson, we ask you to find all kind of online news articles regarding these issues and try to find the most interesting, innovative or surprising. We close the lesson with a news journal where you will briefly discuss the news item you have chosen.

Many problems in society, such as environmental problems and health problems, relate to people’s behavior. Apart from individual behavior, the political and social context play an important role in either supporting the status quo or in changing it. As a project manager, you are often dealing with issues that need behavioral and/or social change in order to be solved. Social marketing is a process that uses marketing principles and techniques to influence target audience behavior that will benefit society as well as the individual. Social marketing finds its roots in public health, but has been put to use in many other fields, such as environmental problems, human rights issues, and the use of innovations in development cooperation or socio-economic development.

In this course, you will analyze a wicked problem from different perspectives, making use of different theories and theoretical models (e.g. psychological, political, economic, sociological) in social marketing. You will need to choose those strategies that have proven to be successful (evidence-based), and put them into practice by developing a social marketing plan to effect social and behavioral change. In order to make your plan for real, you will craft, test and improve a social marketing plan tailored to the purpose and needs of an organization or an interested party.

Globalization, the exponential speed of societal change, the enormous challenges in human and sustainable development, the changing shape of organizations and the aspirations of the next generation all call for a project manager with strong leadership capabilities. In this landscape of forces of integration and disintegration, students need to gain insights in new paradigms of leadership and need to develop the required personal qualities, attitudes and skills.

In this course the focus is to nurture leadership competencies that can be applied broadly speaking in all aspects of one’s life and concretely in the context of diverse purpose-driven teams working in various contexts and seeking to create sustainable value. The course will explore various issues related to the phenomenon of leadership at the intersection of self, we (interpersonal), organizations and society. A significant component of reflection and self-awareness is built into the course, as you are invited to challenge your own assumptions and to apply the insights gained from leadership studies to yourself and your team.

All decisions you make in project management are future oriented. The tricky thing about making decisions about the future, is that we have to make them based on what we know about the past. The world you, your organization or society face in the future, is shaped by trends and developments that are occurring today. We help you to understand these developments, and use them to form ideas about the future. We will be working with two fundamentally different types of developments: developments with low uncertainty and developments with high uncertainty.

In this course we will mainly focus on the latter. They are developments that can go in multiple ways and that we cannot predict. We will discuss these types of developments, discuss methods of analyzing their potential impact, and use them to describe possible futures or scenario’s. In other words, the objective is not to describe what the future will look like, but to identify a number of possible scenario's, and to develop robust strategies that work in all of them.

Complete your exchange semester or year by taking one or more electives. The module Introduction to Windesheim is compulsory for all international students, but you are free to choose from the other options. You will receive ECTS credits when you complete a module successfully. 

Introduction to Windesheim
Intercultural Awareness
Drama and Improvisation
Dutch Language
Dutch Society

Want to know more about the exchange programme of People, Planet & Profit? Check the course catalogue for more information about matters such as assessment and teaching methods.

Read the course catalogue