How can business schools prepare students and researchers to engage seriously with responsible and sustainable futures?
This question shaped the Responsible Futures Skills Lab, convened by Prof. Noemi Sinkovics and hosted at Newcastle University Business School on 6–7 May 2026. The Skills Lab was a BAM co-badged regional event sponsored and supported by academic, professional and institutional partners including the Centre for Climate and Environmental Resilience, the University of Sunderland, Durham University Business School, the Academy of International Business UK & Ireland Chapter, the European Management Journal, the Customer Energy Village Project, NUBS EDI, and the PRME UK & Ireland Chapter. The event offered a practical example of how academies, journals, universities and professional communities can work together to serve their memberships by creating spaces for exchange, experimentation and cross-disciplinary learning.
Two open-access reports from the Skills Lab are now available.
The first report, Teaching for Responsible Futures, focuses on how students can be supported to engage with complexity, uncertainty, responsibility and action. It captures discussions on experiential pedagogies including EN-ROADS, LEGO® Serious Play®, SDG-based reflection, the Better Business Scan, simulation, scenarios and poster-based assessment. A central message is that responsible futures education cannot be reduced to adding more sustainability content. It requires carefully designed learning experiences, structured reflection, assessment that captures shifts in thinking, and institutional systems that value this pedagogical work.
The second report, Research for Responsible Futures, turns to the challenge of designing, coordinating, and publishing cross-disciplinary research. It examines why responsible futures problems rarely sit within one discipline, and why collaboration requires more than assembling a diverse team. The report highlights the need to surface disciplinary assumptions early, design for translation, clarify authorship and outputs, build policy and stakeholder relevance into projects from the start, and recognise the career risks faced by researchers working between established fields.
Together, the reports offer practical insights for educators, researchers, doctoral supervisors, research leaders, editors, funders, business schools and professional and academic associations.
The reports are available open access via Zenodo:
Sinkovics, N., Bogdanovic, A., Robinson, S., Hope, A., Radclyffe-Thomas, N., Hawthorne, L., van Tulder, R., Fiedler, A., Hirst, J., Perez Moraga, V., Blenkinsop, S., Vilasboas Calixto Casnici, C., Scurry, T., Atkinson, K., Bader, B., Mazzetti, A., & Chidambaram, A. B. (2026). Teaching for Responsible Futures: Report from the Responsible Futures Skills Lab, 6 May 2026. Newcastle University Business School, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20351431
Sinkovics, N., Marks, A., Hope, A., Fowler, H., Marsiliani, L., Ott, U., Fiedler, A., van Tulder, R., Hicks, C., Sanderson, R., Rajwani, T., Sinkovics, R., Swaffield, J., Chu, I., Pagan, V., Neesham, C., Allen, M., Long, G., Fath, B., Scurry, T., Tran, Y., Toth, ZS., Glover, C., Corredoira, R., & Chidambaram, A. B. (2026). Research for Responsible Futures: Report from the Responsible Futures Skills Lab, 7 May 2026. Newcastle University Business School. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20352276