Sustainability and innovation

The Globe and Mail published a story on sustainability and how it is becoming a growing topic in business schools. Sustainability in this regard is highly related to innovation and our country's ability to compete internationally. George Brown College is active in sustainability is several ways. On the one hand, our Green Building Centre, funded by FedDev Ontario, enables us to conduct applied research with firms interested in the business of sustainability. As we say on our site: "The Green Building Centre acts as a hub of research infrastructure that connects industry to economically meaningful applied research. This new research hub will focus on the Canadian construction, engineering and IT sectors, facilitating applied research in green construction and sustainable building practices." This is an example of how we are leveraging investment from the federal government and private industry to support innovation related to sustainability in Ontario. Building products and processes developed here to support sustainable building are exportable around the world.

Another way we are supporting sustainability is through curricula. Professor Sandra Neill, in our Academic Excellence department, has recently conducted a sustainability audit of our curricula across the college. The audit was supported through FedDev and NSERC funding. Prof Neill found that the "Integration of sustainability themes at the learning outcome level allows the College to . . . Provide highly relevant sustainability skills & knowledge to George Brown graduates—because these are valuable to their employers and communities." This comprehensive audit resulted in not only enabling George Brown to understand where and how sustainability is taught, but she also created useful tools for others to perform the same audit. These tools are freely available here.