**Ready to Lead the Shift to a Circular Economy?**

The world is moving away from the wasteful linear economy toward a more sustainable, circular one, and it’s shaping the future of business. Engineers, business leaders, managers, and policy-makers are all needed to drive this change. Want to be one of the graduates leading the way? Circular Sustainable Business Development is the course for you! This exciting, multi-disciplinary course is open to all master’s students at UT.

**Why Circular Economy Matters**

In a world focused on sustainability, the circular economy is key to transforming how we produce and consume. As future decision-makers and leaders, it’s essential for students to understand the circular economy in relation to the triple bottom line: People (social impact), Planet (environmental impact), and Profit (economic viability). Through this course, you'll learn how to integrate these elements into business strategy and explore corporate social responsibility from all angles.

**What You’ll Learn**

The course kicks off with the basics of sustainable and circular economies, packed with real-world examples of success stories at the global, national, and regional levels. From there, you’ll work on a challenge-based group project (worth 25% of your grade) to tackle specific sustainability problems.

**Core Topics Covered:**

- **Sustainable Business Models:** Discover how companies can create value from an economic, environmental, and social perspective using the Triple Layered Business Model Canvas (BMC). This tool will allow you to think beyond just profits, incorporating life cycle and stakeholder perspectives.
- **Real-World Impact:** Explore how different sectors, from manufacturing to pharmaceuticals and agri-food, are affected by sustainability, and learn the techniques for measuring sustainability effectively.
- **Sustainability in Supply Chains:** You’ll dive into value recovery from end-of-life products and learn how businesses can shift from linear to circular models. A serious game simulating real-world decision-making will reinforce your learning (worth 25% of your grade). This game will take place at the campus of the University of Twente in Enschede, the Netherlands (see Participant information).
- **Hands-On Experience:** From Life Cycle Assessments to agent-based modeling and game theory, you’ll develop practical skills that will help you lead sustainable business practices.

**Engage with Big Ideas**

In the final weeks, you’ll explore cutting-edge topics driven by your own interests—like food waste, electronic waste management, or the evolution of eco-industrial parks. You’ll finish the course with a final individual written exam (worth 50% of your grade) that ties everything together.

This course is your gateway to becoming a key player in the circular economy transition. Ready to make an impact? Sign up for Circular Sustainable Business Development and start building the future!

CV (Curriculum Vitae) is a document that summarizes your educational and professional history. It must provide a detailed overview of your academic and work experience, skills, achievements, and qualifications.

Motivation letter is a personal statement and it might include a brief introduction of yourself, explanation why are you interested in the learning opportunity you are applying to, any relevant experience or skills that you have, your goals and how this opportunity will help you achieve them, This document should not be more than 400 words.

Motivation Letter

University of Twente

Circular Sustainable Business Development

Shape the future with a circular economy game!

Energy and sustainability

Circular economy

**Be the Change: Solve Global Challenges with Bold Ideas**

Societies all over the world grapple with socio-technical transformations that cause a divide between worldviews, political beliefs, interests, and ways of living. Moreover, we face grand challenges of climate change, inequality, health, and environmental degradation. This course prepares you to take up these challenges proactively and design interventions that co-shape societies for so-called pluriversal futures, in which multiple ways of being, knowing and making can co-exist. You will develop the mindset, knowledge, and skills to help transform - together with regional stakeholders - the social, environmental, and economic system. In this course you will work in a transdisciplinary manner, connect global challenges with local actions, histories with futures, academic with societal perspectives, action with reflection, and critical modes with creative modes of thinking and design.  

**Collaborate, Create, and Lead**

More concretely, this course centers around a real-world challenge-based project. It is partly carried out with the entire group, and partly in small teams. In the context of the project, you will combine a thorough socio-technical and historical analysis of the challenge with a deep understanding of its local context and conduct hands-on co-imagining and co-shaping activities with different representatives from academia, government, industry, and society. These activities allow you to develop advanced design, analysis, and leadership skills. In this course you will learn unique, transdisciplinary methods for framing and analyzing problems and for responsible futuring and prototyping. Together, you will make a difference in society.

**Make an Impact: Real Projects, Real Change**

Activating workshops, intensive coaching sessions, field trips and inspiring guest lectures will support the project. The final product is a challenge analysis and an experiential provocative prototype of pluriversal futures, aimed at engaging stakeholders in a transformation of society in a local context. The assessment of the final product, its justification, and its presentation is pass/fail, with extensive feedback for your personal and professional development. It will be carried out by a broad team of teachers and external stakeholders.

Responsible Futuring

Proactively take up societal challenges and design interventions that co-shape societies for pluriversal futures.

Resilient communities

Entrepreneurship, technology and innovation

Critical and innovative thinking

Inter-personal skills

Global citizenship

The whole world is confronted with the effects of a changing climate. The challenge is how we deal with this situation. So how big is the problem in the city under study? What is at risk, and why? What is being done? What will happen if nothing is done? What would be the effect of adaptation measures?

In this course we follow the conceptual framework on risk defined by IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, www.ipcc.ch), where risk is at the centre. [Figure 1](https://www.ipcc.ch/report/managing-the-risks-of-extreme-events-and-disasters-to-advance-climate-change-adaptation/summary-for-policymakers/spm_fig1/) presents this framework, where three core concepts of weather and climate, exposure and vulnerability interact (IPCC, 2014). The risk of climate-related impacts results from the interaction of climate-related hazards (including weather and climatic events and their trends) with the vulnerability and exposure of human and natural systems. Changes in both the climate system (left) and socioeconomic processes including adaptation and mitigation (right) are drivers for changes in hazard, exposure, and vulnerability (IPCC, 2014).

There are options for risk reduction through adaptation, because adaptation measures can reduce risk by addressing one or more of the three risk factors: vulnerability, exposure, and/or hazard.This can be achieved through various policy and action choices. A visualisation of this process is in [Figure 2.](https://www.ipcc.ch/srocc/chapter/technical-summary/ts-0-introduction/ipcc-srocc-ts_4/) Risk reduction measures through adaptation (Source: IPCC 2019).

The three core concepts of hazard, exposure and vulnerability can be linked to the three core domains of Spatial Engineering: Hazard - Technical Engineering, Vulnerability - Spatial Information Science, and Exposure - Spatial Planning and Governance.

Adapting to Climate Change with Spatial Engineering

Help the city of Valencia (Spain) to adjust sustainably to climate change with Spatial Engineering

Media and information literacy

Intra-personal skills

Nanotechnology has a vital role to play in current sustainable development. Nanotechnology can accelerate progress through technological solutions, including clean water/soil/air and sanitation, to affordable and clean energy solutions and products that fulfil the united nations' sustainable development goals. Multidisciplinary is a key factor, a toolset that contains skills that will allow students to provide solutions to our current society's problems. This is a significant challenge that citizens of the entire world must face and join forces working together within a multidisciplinary context toward developing sustainable solutions and products.  

In this collaborative online international learning (COIL) course, international teams will join forces to create green and eco-friendly nanotechnological solutions. In this case, the development of a sustainable product will be based on four critical pillars:

1. Water purification, remediation, and reuse;
2. Air purification;
3. Soil remediation, and;
4. Energy.

The acquired knowledge is practised using the learned concepts while developing sustainable solutions and products. During product development, life cycle analysis and recyclability aspects will be applied. The course uses a challenge-based approach, requiring students to work together to solve problems and learn how to collaborate with individuals from different cultural backgrounds.

For more information, contact the course coordinator Arturo Susarrey Arce (a.susarreyarce@utwente.nl).

Sustainable Nanotechnology

Help co-create sustainable solutions by developing a product using nanotechnology tools.

The UN's eleventh sustainable development goal (SDG-11) aims at creating sustainable cities and communities. Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH) and University of Twente (UT) alongside ECIU University support this goal and, wants to contribute to a more sustainable future. Climate change is one of the major challenges facing global society. Extreme weather, such as droughts and heavy rain, are expected to increase with climate change, and as recent events show, expose unforeseen vulnerabilities. ECIU University can contribute in (at least two) ways to realizing the SDG by firstly reducing its carbon footprint, and secondly by providing technological solutions that help increase resilience to climate and weather extremes.  
  
Reducing the impact of climate change is a very important issue and one of the most discussed questions in politics and society. While climate change outpaces the current scientific understanding, new technology can offer opportunities to face the impact of climate change as well as contributing to making a more climate neutral world. ECIU University seeks for learners who take responsibility and shape a sustainable future with new mindsets, behaviours, ways of learning, thinking and working in support of new solutions, technologies and innovations. The big idea is to develop a climate neutral campus with innovative ideas and bold solutions and thereby, advance climate protection and reduce CO2 production. Develop a concept that enables your home university or any other university to have a climate neutral campus in the future. Get ready to make a start now. You can be a pioneer and help make a climate neutral campus.

Transcript of Records is an official document issued by your home university. It specifies the name of the institution, the academic programme you are enrolled in, the list of courses taken up until the current period, the exams or tests you passed, the grades and the credits you earned. 

Member university

University of Twente

Member university

University of Twente

Learning opportunities of University of Twente