Enterprise Academy Fellow, Lecturer, School of Marketing and Entrepreneurship

Email: roisin.vize@TUDublin.ie

Róisín Vize, PhD, Lecturer, School of Marketing and Entrepreneurship, TU Dublin

Róisín is a lecturer and researcher in the Marketing discipline in the School of Marketing and Entrepreneurship in TU Dublin. Her research interests revolve around web-based solution services in a retail context, and B2B relationships including digital business networks that operate in two-sided and multi-sided platforms. Róisín has a keen interest in sustainability literacy and embedding sustainability and circular economy principles and competences into her modules and course assignments. She is a member of the Regional National Expert Committee (RNEC) for Sulitest, a UN-supported NGO providing a global online platform for third-level sustainability literacy engagement. (The RNEC aims to develop a national Sulitest module for Ireland.)

Enterprise Academy Fellowship Project 

Sustainability Education: A Marketing Discipline Perspective

This fellowship explored ways to embed sustainability education into the curriculum that is accessible to TU Dublin students across disciplines and offered to enterprise for upskilling and training employees. The project focused on the marketing discipline, which traditionally has a poor reputation from a sustainability context due to its high carbon footprint, which has a linear approach to production and consumption. The discipline is poorly understood in the context of sustainability and the role it can play for firms to grow and profit with purpose. The secondary research interrogated the literature (academic and industry) to gain a deeper understanding into the challenges managers have when moving from linear to circular business practices. Exploratory research considered the role of digital technology and identified a significant lack of awareness of the very poor carbon footprint web-enabled digital tech has. This contradicts the narrative that digitalization and technology play a significant part in the environmental solution when in fact it emits vast quantities of carbon to provide energy for internet data transfer and data consumption. This problem will continue to grow as tech rapidly advances and the rise in large data centres, which consume significant amounts of energy for the transfer of web data. Data collection from in-depth interviews with web solution service providers, consultancy firms, and educational training specialists identified challenges management experience when trying to implement sustainable marketing practices as well as knowledge deficiencies particularly in the digital marketing context. These are areas of opportunity which the Enterprise Academy and TU Dublin can address. This project has many outputs that contribute to closing these knowledge gaps and to help build a more informed and resilient society and economy.