2026 PRME Education Award

The Fellowship advances responsible management education by equipping undergraduate students across disciplines with the critical thinking, communication, and leadership skills necessary to create real world impact and better understand how to solve our world’s most complex challenges. Beyond building these skills, the IMSF simultaneously offers a structure that encourages long-term community engagement that extends well beyond the academic year. The UN SDGs operate as a framework for guiding students’ academic and experiential learning and for taking steps towards creating meaningful change. Moreover, Fellows engage in research under the guidance of accomplished academics while working to address their selected challenge. This unique opportunity builds resilience when dealing with setbacks, teaches Fellows how to responsibly dispute assumptions, and gives them the tools to effectively collect and analyze data.

The IMSF equips Fellows with the necessary skills to excel in leadership, research, and social impact.

Defining a leader as “someone who takes responsibility for the world in which they want to live,” the program focuses on developing skills such as identifying personal values and purpose, tapping into empathy, collaborating across disciplines, and listening carefully to a wide array of stakeholders. Lectures also provide the basis for students to understand how to approach solving complex problems and how impact can be created and evaluated. Additionally, each assignment connects to domain-specific and managerial competencies, designed to foster reflective, ethical, responsible leadership.

Importantly, through their in-class learning and Impact Initiatives, Fellows gain a better understanding of the SDGs and their interconnectedness, as well as the challenges and limitations of the SDGs as a framework. The process of building an initiative underlines the importance of creating partnerships across different stakeholders; showing students that change does not happen in a vacuum. Students need to understand how their chosen problem impacts different communities, and interacts with other issues, before they narrow down a specific area where they can have impact. During this iterative process, Fellows come to understand how to turn big ideas into actionable solutions.

Simultaneously, Faculty Research Projects and Impact Initiatives operate as experiential learning tools where Fellows apply their academic learning in the program to their real-life environments. The academic and experiential components reinforce and interact with one another, enriching students’ learning experiences.

Each component fosters Fellows’ critical thinking skills in an interdisciplinary environment. Whether through experiencing academic research, conducting research on their chosen problem, or an in-class assignment, Fellows gather and critically analyze information from a variety of sources, questioning and considering how problems need answers, and that some answers require many different types of insight. Students complete the Fellowship with knowledge about the SDGs, a better understanding of the landscapes in which complex problems exist, and how they can purposefully situate themselves in those environments to create positive impact, moving forward.

The IMSF is built on empowering an interdisciplinary community of changemakers and the knowledge that meaningful change takes time.

The IMSF model is circular. It supports students through resources and skill development so that they can support others. It builds Fellows into leaders so that alumni of the program can provide mentorship to the next cohort of students. It exposes students to the world of research so that they can learn first-hand what it means to ask important questions that have no clear answers and sit in the uncertainty of asking their own difficult questions, taking one careful step at a time. This circular model allows the IMSF to establish long-term, meaningful change.

The IMSF’s unique combination of leadership development, Impact Initiative development, and research has proven to benefit students, the University, and a multitude of communities, both locally and beyond. Any university seeking to enhance the student experience and offerings, empower the next generation of conscious leaders, and contribute to the advancement of the SDGs, would benefit from a model like that of the IMSF. This unique model also allows the enhancement of the university’s research capabilities by fostering student-researcher connections at the undergraduate level.