Responsible Management Education

Regina Obexer:PRME stands for "Principles for Responsible Management Education" and is a United Nations initiative that was launched in 2007. The aim of PRME is to anchor and promote responsibility, ethics and sustainability as fundamental values in education and research at universities. PRME offers an international community to develop and support cooperation and exchange between universities in order to promote dialog and awareness regarding the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The MCI has been a member of PRME since 2011 and was also involved in the establishment of the regional group, the PRME Chapter DACH, in which we are still actively involved today. The RMER (Responsible Management Education Research Conference) took place for the first time at the MCI at the end of September with the topic "Social Impact of Entrepreneurship & Innovation: Responsible Management Education for the Changemakers of Tomorrow".

Regina Obexer: We attached great importance to making the event as sustainable as possible. Our team, consisting of Renate Windbichler and Julia Waldegger with Lucas Schuchter and Alex Dumfort, initially took care of the certification of the event as a Green Event of the Climate Alliance Tyrol. In order to obtain this certification, aspects such as catering, waste separation, communication, etc. must be documented in advance and it must be shown that the event is being held in a way that conserves resources and protects the environment as much as possible. For example, with feld:schafft as our caterer, we only offered vegetarian food without any disposable packaging, we almost completely dispensed with printed documents and encouraged our participants to travel to the conference sustainably, to drink good Tyrolean water (they all received a glass bottle in the conference package) and to get around Innsbruck on foot. We also carried out a CO2 balance for the entire conference, with over 90% of the event's CO2 emissions being attributable to participants' travel to and from the event. We will compensate for this CO2 footprint with a contribution to the project "Safe drinking water and clean air for Soroti / Uganda" of the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, which the conference participants selected as their preferred compensation project.

Regina Obexer: Unfortunately, I personally had very little time at the conference to get involved in the content, but I am taking the following things away with me in particular:

• We need to involve students much more in our considerations, plans and also implementation and give them a more active role. Instead of "reading" content to them, they should be actively involved as partners in co-creative learning processes in order to meet the challenges of our time. This is the only way for them to acquire and practice relevant skills, but also to gain the self-confidence that they are able to make a valuable contribution.
• Secondly, it was great for me to see how many colleagues in the company were actively involved and how various inputs and meetings resulted in both new contacts and new ideas. We will now keep working to turn these inspirations into concrete projects and measures.
• And the third aspect is that we must and may think and communicate positively. The way we meet our students, what we expect from them and how we talk to them makes a big difference. If we want to prepare our students for the world of tomorrow, in which there are indeed enough huge challenges, then we have to do this on the basis of empathy and respect, and give them the confidence that they can help shape the necessary changes as changemakers.