Flanders DC Academic Seminar: Leveraging environmental management in operations: Does it pay to be green?

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The Flanders DC Academic Seminars are a series of research seminars for academics, faculty and researchers. International top academics are invited at Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School under the Flanders DC Faculty in Residence Programme helping Flanders DC and Flanders DC Knowledge Center to gain new insights in the field of creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship and internationalisation.  The Flanders DC academic seminars are open, free of charge, to interested faculty and researchers from all universities and knowledge institutions. The list of research seminars is regularly updated.

Academic seminar: Leveraging environmental management in operations: Does it pay to be green?

Customers, regulators, and the public are increasingly demanding that firms minimize the impact of their products and operations on the natural environment within the frame of sustainable development. In response, management research has evolved over the last decade or so from a narrow focus on the concept of pollution control to a much larger set of management decisions, programs and technologies that contribute to greener operations.

After tracing earlier research that explored whether it pays to be green, this presentation uses a multi-dimensional definition of environmental expenditures to examine implications for performance. Multi-year data drawn from several government databases provided the basis for empirically testing the financial returns that result in manufacturing from specific patterns of environmental expenditures and tools. Overall, expenditures targeted toward environmental management practices emerged as a key lever in improving manufacturing performance. Finally, I conclude by extrapolating from these results to emerging areas of sustainability-related research in operations management.

Speaker

The session of February 4 will be hosted by Prof. dr. Rob Klassen. Robert Klassen is a Professor of Operations Management at Ivey. His research interests focus on exploring the linkages between operations and the natural environment, including international operations. This research has emphasized, first, characterizing the pattern of investment in environmental technologies, and second, understanding both the antecedents and performance outcomes of these investments. His research has been published in Management Science, Journal of Operations Management, Academy of Management Journal, and Decision Sciences, among others. He is currently serving on the Editorial Review Board for the Journal of Operations Management. Robert Klassen was the Chair of the Operations Management division of the Academy of Management in 2001, and previously served as the Program Chair in 1999. In addition to teaching the first-year operations management course in the MBA and EMBA programs, he has recently introduced a new course in Managing for Sustainable Development. He has also taught electives in the Developing and Managing Technology, Management of Services and Operations Strategy. He continues to actively develop new teaching materials, including over 20 cases and exercises in the area of operations strategy, process analysis, quality management and environmental management. Robert Klassen has been appointed as Flanders DC Faculty in Residence at the Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School. During his visitingship his research will particularly focus on improving social performance in supply chains.

Practicalities

• The Flanders DC Academic Seminar takes place on Wednesday 4 February 2009 from 12 till 13:30 hrs in room A2.0.2 at our Leuven Campus.
• The Flanders DC Academic Seminars will be held in English
• As sandwiches will be provided, please subscribe before 2 February 2009
• You are also more than welcome to invite colleagues from other colleges and universities as well, but for practical reasons we would like them to register too.