Innovation in Educational and Societal Transformation: The MacArthur Foundation, Jesuit Business Schools, and the World

On June 2, 2016, the MacArthur Foundation announced a competition awarding $100 million to a single project that would contribute toward solving a significant societal problem. Six weeks later, in Nairobi, Kenya, the members of the annual meeting of the International Association of Jesuit Business Schools’ World Forum unanimously passed a resolution requesting the submission of an application that utilized the resources of the global network of Jesuit business schools in addressing the inter-connected problem of global unsustainability, social injustice, and poverty. This article reports on the resulting 2016 application as well as on a possible 2019 version that builds upon it. The article emphasizes four aspects of innovation at the core of both these applications and the 2016 MacArthur Foundation competition. The four areas are: 1) the MacArthur Foundation’s innovative approach to inspiring societal change; 2) innovation in teaching and research content—transforming teaching materials and research topics in business schools, both Jesuit and other; 3) innovation in the processes of organizational transformation—participating business schools transforming their teaching and research in an “impossibly” short time period of only three years; and 4) innovation in the processes of societal transformation—achieving collaborative transformation among business schools, the business community, governmental agencies, spiritual and religious organizations, social enterprises, and not-for-profits

What We Want this Journal to Be: Our First Editorial Essay in which We Hope to Start a Continuing and Evolving Conversation about Why We are Now Creating this New Journal and What We Want It to Become

The primary purpose of this journal is to help all of us move more rapidly toward a sustainable and socially just world. We will seek to do so by providing a forum in which scholarship oriented toward sustainability and social justice, that is, toward building a better world for all, can be published and, we hope, influence all of us as scholars, managers, leaders, and citizens of the world to effect positive change. We, the editorial board, believe that this purpose is stable and we hope that our editors, contributors, and readers will be willing and eager to take risks, try out new ideas and types of analysis, insights, and approaches, learn from our experiences, and welcome changes in and evolution of the journal. It is clear that even the best informed and wisest among us has little certainty about how to manage for global sustainability. Humility thus is appropriate in all we write and do—but we seek to combine humility with intellectual rigour and professional boldness