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Amid multiple crises and increasing volatility, sustainable development is a pressing concern. Higher Education for Sustainable Development, especially Responsible Management Education (RME), drives transformative change by fostering new perspectives on work, decision-making and leadership. Conferences serve as pivotal sustainability discussion platforms, yet many remain traditional and lack interactive student engagement. This hinders active involvement and collaborative problem-solving. The Global Goals Design Jam, a dynamic, nontraditional format explored in this study offers an alternative approach. By blending design thinking and playful learning and constructivist learning methods, the Global Goals Design Jam offers a space for collaborative and creative Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) solutions. At the ninth Responsible Management Education Research Conference (RMERC) in September 2022, students from various universities took part in a Global Goals Design Jam. The current prestudy postulates that participation in a Global Goals Design Jam is primarily associated with positive attributes related to emotions and a sense of coherence. The potential for empowering learners to navigate real-world complexities and contribute to sustainability is highlighted, establishing formats like the Global Goals Design Jam as a valuable addition to educational conferences with a sustainability focus. The results also highlight potentials and limitations of the format and provide insights into further research requirements.

This chapter delves into sustainability-related competences in innovation management for further education as part of the European lifelong learning initiative. Despite extensive research in primary and secondary education, adult education often remains overlooked. Competence-based learning is a favored approach to integrating knowledge, skills, and attitudes across various domains. Through thematic analysis and deductive coding, the study examines 72 innovation management-related further education programs conducted in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, between June and December 2022. The findings unequivocally demonstrate the inclusion of sustainability competences in innovation-related further education. Notably, Strategic Competence emerges as the most prevalent, while Normative Competence appears least frequently. This research significantly advances the convergence of further education in innovation management, responsible management education, and competence-based learning, emphasizing the importance of sustainability competences in adult learning contexts. By shedding light on this underexplored domain, the study prompts further exploration and development of sustainable educational practices for lifelong learning.

In an era of polycrisis, we argue that responsible leaders need to unlearn common thinking patterns imprinted by old (management) paradigms in order to find new solutions to the grand challenges of our time. To be able to overcome the “crisis of the imagination” and spur narratives about more sustainable futures, leaders need to update and restructure their skill sets and invest in developing anticipatory and futures (thinking) skills, as well as futures literacy as a competence. To achieve this on the student level, we also need to rethink business and management education at the university level by challenging the ways we teach, i.e., teaching pedagogics, as well as the content and story we want to tell about the future of management. Thus, with this chapter, we aim to rethink pedagogical methods and tools by introducing educators to potential pathways for equipping students with adequate skills to be able to “use-the-future”. As the process of unlearning is difficult, we argue that we need to venture out of the business discipline and push the barriers of the business and management curriculum so as to be able to further unleash creativity and imagination. To achieve this aim, we propose the integration of methods and approaches from art-related disciplines, such as theater, visual arts, or design, into the business curriculum.