It Is Smart Only If It Is Sustainable. Environmentally Friendly Business Strategies As A Source Of Creating Bigger Value Pool And Reducing Negative Environmental Impacts

In today’s world, we thrashed about with intensive resource exploitation, increased productivity and increasing returns to scale to make abnormal profits and to form a system that favours the survival and growth of the corporate sector at the cost of environmental degradation. It is only now that the expression, ‘environmental sustainability’, which is to sustain or prolong the environment, became a focal point in today’s corporate social responsibility agendas and reports. But this vagary of the corporate sector to decipher the environmental degradation enigma has not worked due to existing system and outdated strategies. Therefore, this paper calls for reinventing the system by unleashing wave of innovations, crafting new strategies, and having a vision based on transformation. To illustrate my points, I focus on the smartphone industry to unveil its environmental impact at every phase of its life cycle and throughout the supply chain. The environmental impact of the smartphone is evident at the extraction of raw material, manufacturing, distribution and packaging, use, and end of life phases. The key challenge for understanding these impacts is the complexity of the smartphone and its value chain. Smartphone, throughout its life cycle, also plays a huge part in perilous climate change. Deforestation, inefficient mining of metals and ‘rare earths’, air, water and land pollution, use of toxic chemicals, enormous e-waste generation, harmful smelting processes, ineffective companies’ policies and government regulations and irrational consumer behaviours – all are evils associated with smartphones’ entire life cycle. Also, the CO2 emissions for all the phases of the life cycle of the smartphones for the year 2020 are forecasted to be around 390.4 megatons. I think environmental sustainability objectives require complex systems thinking for which we need collaborative effort. In this regard, I have designed what I call a “meta strategy” for “environmental sustainability”. The “meta strategy” not just provides a guiding lens to mitigate smartphones’ environmental impact but it can result in minimizing expenses of the smartphones’ entire life cycle phase by phase, by taking advantage from others’ competencies and creating clusters or partnerships, which in turn creates a larger value pool for every single actor involved. Around 6.1 billion smartphones are expected to be in use by 2020, thus creating an awareness regarding its environmental impact and providing a strategy to mitigate its environmental impact will have a tremendous multiplier effect among users, and a system changing and influential behaviour among manufacturers respectively

Designing EthAKUL: A mobile just-in-time learning environment for bioethics in Pakistan

In developing countries such as Pakistan, bioethics has not been included in mainstream thinking in medical education. The authors’ experiences suggest that current methods of teaching bioethics are problematic as students are unable to translate theory to practice. Alternative pedagogies, such as just-in-time learning (JiTL) using mobile devices, may be able to foster the development and implementation of ethical reasoning among nurses, doctors, and medical and nursing students. This research was conceived to determine the effectiveness of mobile JiTL – anytime, anyplace learning through mobile devices – for teaching bioethics. After obtaining ethical clearance, a participatory design (PD) approach was adopted to ensure input from all stakeholders for the design of ‘EthAKUL’, comprising a mobile app, five modules and just-in-time pedagogy. The name of the app is an acronym evoking ethics, learning and the university where the project originated. As a part of the design process, three PD workshops were held with junior doctors, nurses, nursing students, medical students and bioethics teaching faculty, and five meetings were held with faculty members, to discuss functional specifications and user-acceptance testing of the app. The feedback related to the nature of common ethical issues encountered in clinical settings, the existing process of teaching and learning bioethics, and the requested features of the app were recorded. These data sets were analyzed and synthesized into functional and technical specifications for the mobile app. The software programmers developed the app with the close involvement of the stakeholders. The development of teaching content continued alongside this process. While this enabled EthAKUL’s developers to incorporate needs of all stakeholders, challenges were encountered in the process relating to the pragmatic and conceptual aspects of JiTL, ML and PD. We discuss the implications of this research in bringing about transformative changes in higher education