Beyond Sustainability Content: Scaling Responsible Futures Education and Research

How can business schools move responsible management education beyond committed individuals, isolated modules, and one-off classroom interventions?

This question shaped the Responsible Futures Skills Lab, convened by Prof. Noemi Sinkovics and hosted at Newcastle University Business School, a PRME Champion institution, on 6–7 May 2026. The Skills Lab was developed with support from the Centre for Climate and Environmental Resilience, the University of Sunderland, Durham University Business School, Academy of International Business UK & Ireland Chapter, European Management Journal, Customer Energy Village Project, NUBS EDI, British Academy of Management the PRME UK & Ireland Chapter.

The event brought together educators, researchers, editors, climate scholars, pedagogical innovators and professional communities to examine a practical challenge facing many business schools: how to make responsible futures work institutionally sustainable. Rather than asking only which tools or pedagogies educators can use, the Skills Lab asked how these approaches can be embedded, assessed, recognised, supported and scaled across programmes, research cultures and professional communities.

Two open-access reports from the Skills Lab are now available.

The first report, Teaching for Responsible Futures, focuses on the conditions that allow responsible futures education to move beyond content addition. It captures discussions on experiential pedagogies including EN-ROADS, LEGO® Serious Play®, SDG-based reflection, the Better Business Scan, simulation, scenarios and poster-based assignments. These approaches align with PRME’s Impactful Five (i5) characteristics, but the Skills Lab’s main contribution lies in what comes after adoption: how educators design reflection and assessment, how programme teams evidence changed thinking, and how institutions create the time, recognition, leadership alignment and reward systems needed for such pedagogies to become part of the educational fabric rather than isolated examples of good practice.

The second report, Research for Responsible Futures, extends this institutional question into research. Responsible future challenges rarely sit within one discipline, yet academic careers, journal rankings, Research Excellence Framework (REF) pressures, promotion criteria and disciplinary evaluation systems often reward work that fits clearly within established fields. The report examines how cross-disciplinary research can be designed, coordinated, and published without becoming superficial, extractive or career-limiting. It highlights the need to surface disciplinary assumptions early, design for translation, clarify authorship and outputs, build policy and stakeholder relevance into projects from the start, and create research environments where interdisciplinary work is recognised rather than treated as a risk.

Together, the reports offer practical insights for educators, programme leaders, doctoral supervisors, research leaders, editors, funders, business schools and professional associations. For the PRME community, their value lies in connecting responsible management education with the institutional work required to sustain it: curriculum design, assessment, educator support, research strategy, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and the professional communities that make shared learning possible.

The reports are available open access via Zenodo:

Sinkovics, N., Bogdanovic, A., Robinson, S., Hope, A., Radclyffe-Thomas, N., Hawthorne, L., van Tulder, R., Fiedler, A., Hirst, J., Perez Moraga, V., Blenkinsop, S., Vilasboas Calixto Casnici, C., Scurry, T., Atkinson, K., Bader, B., Mazzetti, A., & Chidambaram, A. B. (2026). Teaching for Responsible Futures: Report from the Responsible Futures Skills Lab, 6 May 2026. Newcastle University Business School, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20351431

Sinkovics, N., Marks, A., Hope, A., Fowler, H., Marsiliani, L., Ott, U., Fiedler, A., van Tulder, R., Hicks, C., Sanderson, R., Rajwani, T., Sinkovics, R., Swaffield, J., Chu, I., Pagan, V., Neesham, C., Allen, M., Long, G., Fath, B., Scurry, T., Tran, Y., Toth, Zs., Glover, C., Corredoira, R., & Chidambaram, A. B. (2026). Research for Responsible Futures: Report from the Responsible Futures Skills Lab, 7 May 2026. Newcastle University Business School. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20352276