Pitching on sustainability

The New Business school had it’s opening of the academic year at the 4th of September in “De Duif”, a church in the heart of Amsterdam.

Out of all first-year students 10 were picked to present their pitches on sustainability. I thought it would be fun to post a picture of mine:

The future of sustainability in one minute:

Sustainability is a problem of time but most importantly it is a problem of human-nature. Human nature limits our view of the world to the length of our lives. People don’t care what happens decades in the future, they care what happens now.
Sustainability equals long-term thinking, while humans are shortsighted creatures.

So if sustainability is indeed a problem of time and human-nature we have before us a task of either bending time, altering human-nature, or changing the entire face of sustainability. Obviously the latter is the easiest to achieve.

Shortly, how will our generation change the face of Sustainability? Simple, make sustainability profitable, create incentive. Make short-sighted multinationals drool over the latest sustainable solutions, make them want more, in higher volume.
Stop regarding sustainability as charity, instead, regard it as business at the highest level.

Wubbo Ockels

Besides the pitches performed by students we had Wubbo Ockels (famous in the Netherlands for going into space) come over and do a masterclass on sustainability, very cool indeed!

We also had our Dean, Timo Timmerman, our associate-dean Ben Wijering and Maurits van Rooijen from Westminster university give speeches. All in all a very good opening of my first academic year !