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Traditionally, wasted resources are considered a burden that imposes a cost on organizations. However, ecological sustainability principles underpinning the linked discourses of industrial ecology and the Circular Economy conceptualize waste as intrinsically valuable. Our research identified exemplar business organizations that had each changed their business models to resolve the tension of waste as a burden and/or resource. Synthesizing these cases, we found these organizations applied systems thinking to reframe their product and service offerings and developed material circular flows in their business models. Analysis of how our exemplar organizations changed their business models to tackle pressing sustainability issues and to resolve the burden–resource tension show that the focus of change is on reconceptualizing their understanding of the role of waste in the value chain of their products and services. This altered understanding of waste as a resource across their value networks initiated negotiations with their existing suppliers to also modify their supply chain practices.

This article aims to explore factors that influence organizational learning around sustainability. For our theoretical framework, we take a sensemaking approach to the multilevel 4I model of organizational learning. Through our pilot study of the case of the higher education sector in Australia, we explore the particular challenges that sustainability poses in terms of integrating new ideas at the group and organizational levels. Our findings suggest that the use of knowledge sharing and generation tools in the form of selected boundary objects can promote the development of communities of practice and hence those integration and institutionalization processes described by the 4I framework when it is applied to sustainability. In specifically allowing for knowledge development and transfer across knowledge and disciplinary boundaries, our revised version of the 4I model has wide relevance to learning around sustainability in any organizational context.

This article reports on an exploratory project that employed an action research approach to integrating sustainability into core subjects in the MBA program at an Australian university. It documents the change methodology used, the theoretical basis for this choice, and the project outcomes. It then identifies some key enabling factors and barriers to successful integration of sustainability themes into the MBA. The article also draws on theories of organizational change to illustrate the strengths and limitations of the approach used in this study compared to other possible approaches. Key success factors included active faculty participation from the redesign process to evaluation and collaboration between multiple stakeholders.