Across the CEMS Alliance, member schools are finding different answers: putting students into climate negotiations, challenging them to solve sustainability problems for companies, embedding responsible leadership across the curriculum and connecting classroom learning with tangible social impact.
The CEMS Sustainability & Social Responsibility Award celebrates these efforts, spotlighting CEMS member schools that bring sustainability to life through business education. Connecting education, ethics and sustainability, the award recognises the work happening across the Alliance to equip students to rethink established approaches to business and contribute to more responsible and sustainable models.
This year, four CEMS member schools take the spotlight: University of St.Gallen, Koç University Graduate School of Business, Corvinus University of Budapest and SGH Warsaw School of Economics.
Ahead of the winner announcement at the CEMS Annual Events in Seoul, we celebrate the practices behind their nominations.
University of St.Gallen: Learning to navigate competing interests
Sustainability decisions involve competing priorities. At University of St.Gallen, students experience that complexity first-hand, learning to work through tensions between business performance, environmental responsibility and societal needs.
In the Block Seminar, Leading the Way: Corporate Sustainability Simulation & Strategies, students develop an international business and make sustainability decisions as part of its strategy. With approximately 70–90 hours of learning, the seminar gives students starting their CEMS year at St.Gallen sustained practice in connecting responsible leadership with management decisions.
The elective Climate Change / Model UNFCCC expands that perspective. Students represent national and institutional interests, balancing climate ambition with economic development, justice and feasibility. Its 100–145 hours include extensive preparation, requiring students to understand a position deeply before negotiating with others.
The school structures learning around awareness, analysis, action and reflection. This progression helps students move from recognising a challenge to making decisions and examining their consequences. St.Gallen’s contribution is to develop the judgement needed when responsible choices are complex and collective progress depends on understanding different perspectives.
Koç University: Turning sustainability challenges into real solutions
At Koç University Graduate School of Business, students learn to translate sustainability ambitions into proposals that organisations can use.
The Sustainable Business Strategies for Competitiveness course centres on semester-long projects with companies or NGOs. Students act as consultants, investigating a real brief and developing recommendations grounded in organisational needs. Their work has included a diversity, equity and inclusion benchmarking report and a pharmaceutical company’s social responsibility strategy addressing vocational training, youth STEM education and community health literacy.
For home CEMS students taking this mandatory course and the sustainability-focused Block Seminar, the two experiences represent approximately 145 hours of learning. Incoming students can choose the strategy course as an elective.
The Block Seminar, Driving Global Impact Through Sustainable Entrepreneurship, takes students onto an electric vehicle manufacturer’s production floor before asking them to pitch ventures to an executive jury. Proposals have included battery second-life assistive devices and inclusive electric mobility platforms.
Koç’s approach connects sustainability, competitiveness and entrepreneurship. Students practise building a business case for ideas that respond to environmental and social challenges, while learning what it takes to make those ideas credible.
Corvinus University of Budapest: Making impact everyone’s responsibility
At Corvinus University of Budapest, sustainability is treated as a programme-wide responsible leadership capability.
Every student encounters sustainability through the core curriculum, while 14 courses and programme elements extend learning across strategy, leadership, finance, supply chains, behavioural economics and climate governance.
Experiential learning includes ESG investment work, community projects, leadership simulations and an intensive UN climate-negotiation roleplay involving 80 in-class and 100 out-of-class hours. Sustainability also reaches every Business Project through a structured impact reflection, with 3 of 8 current projects directly addressing sustainability challenges.
The programme goes a step further by measuring outcomes. Sustainability competencies are formally assessed, while Sulitest TASK results place participants in the top 40% internationally.
Combined with faculty-led SDG mapping and alignment with the CEMS Responsible Leadership Competence Model, this makes sustainability a capability students are expected to demonstrate, not simply understand.
SGH Warsaw School of Economics: Connecting business learning with social participation
SGH Warsaw School of Economics brings sustainability into a broad range of business subjects, helping students encounter it throughout their CEMS experience.
The school reports sustainability coverage in more than 70% of its CEMS courses. Corporate partner teaching connects it with ESG due diligence, financial inclusion and organisational transformation, while every Business Project includes a sustainability impact assessment.
The Solving Social Challenges: Managerial Tools elective offers approximately 150 hours of learning and is taken by half the cohort. Alongside this academic engagement, the CEMS Club’s CEMS Chance initiative supported 60 teenagers from underprivileged backgrounds through workshops and mentoring.
SGH connects professional skills with social participation, showing students how they can contribute through both business decisions and personal action.
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Together, these four nominations show how CEMS schools are turning sustainability from theory into action, helping students develop the mindset and skills to lead more responsible and sustainable businesses.
Congratulations to University of St.Gallen, Koç University Graduate School of Business, Corvinus University of Budapest and SGH Warsaw School of Economics on their nominations.
The winner of the 2026 CEMS Sustainability & Social Responsibility Award will be announced at the CEMS Annual Events in Seoul this November.
