ISSUE Guide to the develop the IO5 Green Office TOOLKIT

Green Office TOOLKIT - ACTIVITIES TEMPLATE

ACTIVITY 1 – Software and Application

Innovation for Sustainability
Target group: Students
Learning Goals
Each year, the software and application innovation course has changing themes to promote
learning in different environments. This year, the theme that was chosen was sustainability
wherein the students learn how to innovate new meaningful software solutions and applications
based on some technology as well as what is the technical and business feasibility of the solution
in domestic and international markets. This course attempts to resolve issues related to SDG’s
using software-based solutions.
Additionally, it brings Business and Engineering people together with different international
cultures, to create teamwork, learn different perceptions of sustainability-related problems. The
various tools and methods used in the course also allow for different collaborative experiences
to engage students better. The knowledge and learning goals provided by the course can be
summarised in three main areas:
Practise-oriented meaning that students will innovate new solutions for real
problems/challenges to develop the problem-solving ability and provide practical solutions to
the world’s sustainability issues.
Teamwork-based meaning that students will work in teams, present in teams and succeed or
fail as a team. This part of the learning goal promotes internationalisation, cross-cultural
multidisciplinary experiences and provides new perceptions to project work related to
sustainability.
A complete project meaning that students create their ideas, innovate, research, reflect, argue,
develop ("implement"), evaluate, document and present them. This learning goal provides a
complete process of innovation to critically think, evaluate and improve upon their own ideas
to develop a creative continuous improvement culture.

Context for Use

In a world where smart phones, computers, cloud and artificial intelligence has been driving
multiple industries towards growth, its effect on sustainability is less talked about. Therefore,
the main reason to use sustainability as a theme in a software course was to explore
opportunities, the impacts that digitalisation could have to solve the world’s problems.
Secondly, as part of the LUT’s trailblazer strategy wherein we are focused on carbon negativity
to provide solutions to real challenges, it was “a push” from the policymakers of LUT to integrate
the sustainability perspective into the course and create additional value for stakeholders.

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Lastly, the theme of sustainability was not chosen to directly increase awareness on
sustainability but instead it is assumed that students as well as professors of LUT are already
aware on various sustainability-related issues. However, they were not aware of the impacts on
sustainability that a concept could have. Therefore, making students reflect upon their own
work to reassess the impacts of the develop solution on SDG’s, sustainability, local as well as
international domains without compromising and creating major secondary problems was
necessary. Hence, more attention was paid towards the reflection of a team towards the
develop solution to critically think and assess the sustainability impact that they had on the
society, the culture, law and many other factors.

Teaching Materials
The mode of teaching for this course was a flipped classroom, wherein students interacted with
each other on the day of the workshop where they present their development to each other but
learn on their own through lectures and self-reading materials. Some teaching materials utilised
for the course were as follows:
Miro Board and online open access tool which allows students to collaborate and work in the
same sheet to put down their thoughts and brainstormed ideas to discuss on
Stakeholder analysis template. This template helps to identify the different stakeholders for the
idea, what is important to the stakeholder, how he could influence the project and the impact
that he would have in the project, different methods that could be used to engage the
stakeholder and the stakeholder’s contribution to the project
Business model development. Business model canvas and flourishing business canvas were
used. The flourishing business canvas is a new tool that helps create sustainable business models
by taking into account other ecosystem actors to identify opportunities and build a sustainable
network of ecosystem.
Impact assessment. SuSaf Framework of sustainability, Circles of Sustainability and participatory
systems mapping were used for assessing the impact of the sustainability solutions created by
students.
Besides, for market analysis, and competitive benchmarking no special template was used but
some students used the Moscow technique to prioritise a list of features that their software
would have.

Teaching Notes and Tips

Some teaching notes and tips recommend that students prefer the course be off-line, wherein
discussion and exchange of ideas is important. However, given the current meta of COVID-19
where most teaching activities were switched towards online remote methods, it was necessary
to engage students and have more interactions between them. Therefore, some collaborative
innovation tools such as the Miro board were used in the course. Moreover, reflection tools are
highly recommended for building critical thinking ability in students. One-to-one student group
sessions also help wherein the professor can provide individual guidance to the group. This not

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only promotes interaction between the teacher and students but also makes the students
express themselves more as compared to that of a class.

Reference and Resources

http://www.tools4dev.org/category/resources/templates/ - Stakeholder analysis template
http://flourishingbusiness.org/the-toolkit-flourishing-business-canvas/ - Flourishing Business
Canvas
https://www.strategyzer.com/canvas/business-model-canvas- - Strategyzer Business Model
canvas
https://www.circlesofsustainability.org/ - Circles of Sustainability Impact assessment
https://zenodo.org/record/3676514/files/SusAF%20-%20workbook%20-%20V5%20-
%20english%20-%20baseline.pdf?download=1 – Sustainability Awareness Framework SUSaf

ACTIVITY 2 – Canteen customer satisfaction

evaluation
Target group: Staff and Faculty
Learning Goals
The main objective of this activity is to motivate the staff and faculty of LUT University to eat
more vegetarian and green food instead of meat in order to be more sustainable. Currently, LUT
university is focused on becoming carbon-negative by the year 2024 and multiple plans have
been laid out for this purpose. One of the largest carbon footprints of LUT University comes from
food. Therefore, this activity proposes a potential practical solution to the problem of meat
consumption in canteens to reduce our carbon footprint. The goals for this activity are to
promote vegetarian food, its health benefits and make people aware about health benefits of
the vegetarian food.

Context for Use

LUT University’s meat consumption accounts for 33% of its total carbon footprint. This meat
consumption comes from various canteens wherein students, faculty as well as staff consume
more meat than vegetarian food. As a result, the canteens and restaurants must order large
quantities of meat. We got in touch with our Sustainability office manager and discussed with
her on these points. This shifted our focus towards proposing a practical solution towards a
greener University that could increase the vegetarian consumption in the university to maximise
the impact of sustainability.
By conducting some short peer interviews with students and faculty we found that most people
opt for non-vegetarian food as the vegetarian dishes are not tasty. Since the taste of the food is
the problem, we decided to propose a solution to let the canteens know about the quality of
food served on a certain day.

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Teaching Materials
We propose to have a feedback system implemented in the LUT Buffet as the first step towards
a more sustainable and greener canteen. One of the benefits of having a feedback system would
be to know the quality of food delivered on a particular day, a week or a certain meal. This type
of a system introduced is not new and is already used by the Aalef group cafeteria in the student
Union building.

The concept is that if vegetarian food receives mostly low grades from the staff and students,
chefs and the canteen management will be more willing to introduce new, more tasty meals or
improve their recipes in the menu. This is important because most staff members, as well as
students, have let us know that the vegetarian food is not as tasty as a nonvegetarian food. This
method would provide us with some empirical data and allow canteen management or chefs to
know which vegetarian dishes must be improved.

This simple feedback solution could help us improve the universities sustainability by motivating
people to choose more tasty vegetarian food over nonvegetarian.

Pros: the system is easy and simple to use and does not require any complex maintenance. For
this service, the Happy or Not company provides a service which allows users to record feedback.
Statistics of their feedback system are shown to the students when entering the restaurant. The
system does not require more than two clicks to register a response and can easily provide
analytics and data to improve the food quality. The system is cheap to implement.

Cons: There might be a minor investment from LUT university side however, this investment
would be worth its price if we could improve our vegetarian meals through feedback provided
from these machines.

Teaching Notes and Tips

There are no teaching notes and tips to this activity.

Reference and Resources

https://www.happy-or-not.com/en/smiley-touch/ - Happy or not Feedback system
https://www.lut.fi/web/en/get-to-know-us/introducing-the-university/sustainable-
development-and-responsibility/sustainable-campuses- Main sources of GHG emission in LUT
(2020)

ACTIVITY 3 – Knowledge exchange sessions of

students and canteen management
Target group: students and Staff
Learning Goals

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The objective is to improve the quality of vegetarian dishes and motivate people to try
vegetarian food more than nonvegetarian foods. Promote vegetarian food, its health benefits
and can make for a healthy social society and help achieve the LUT sustainability goals that have
been drafted out by university management

Context for Use

We have proposed the university management to create knowledge exchange sessions between
the students of LAB University (part of LUT university with bachelor studies) in Hospitality
management and in Healthcare as well as the chefs of the LUT Buffet, periodically. LAB university
Hospitality students have already been getting hands-on experience for running an internal
restaurant at the Gastro Saimaa bar in LAB University of applied sciences that makes them
competent and knowledgeable about different types of dishes, cuisines , and healthy foods that
they have tried in their restaurant management courses as well as internships. Additionally,
Healthcare students can make suggestions about healthy diet and healthy meals for the menu.

Having knowledge exchange sessions between the students and the chefs can allow students to
learn from LUT Buffet chefs experience but more importantly it can allow the chefs to try new
recipes, modify their existing recipes and make better and healthier vegetarian foods.

Combining the idea of feedback systems with the knowledge exchange discussions will help the
university to gather feedback and quantify the impact of the sessions periodically. Moreover, it
will create an open innovative culture in the university people learn from each other.

Teaching Materials
The objective of such a session is not to teach but to have a discussion on how we could all
improve and contribute to the skill set of each other.

Pros: The overall recipes provided by the gastro Saimaa Bar run by students have received good
feedback over the past few weeks. Healthcare students have already participated in the practical
program where they consulted LUT students and employees on healthy diet. This exchange
session can be part of their practical assignments and can be implemented with minimal costs
as infrastructure required for these meetings already exists.

Cons: Chiefs and students would have to dedicate some time (at least 2 hours a month) to these
knowledge exchange sessions.

Therefore, we could try and arrange these knowledge exchange sessions to share experiences
and learn from each other to improve food quality for vegetarian dishes in LUT canteens.
Additionally, LUT will create flyers and posters related to healthy vegetarian diet and
disseminate them near canteens to promote, motivate and make people aware of about healthy
vegetarian food for this.

Teaching Notes and Tips

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The flyers or posters that will be developed will not force people to take vegetarian dishes but
will be informative in nature. Posters will be about positive effects rather than negative effects
of non-vegetarian foods. They would indicate health benefits, some interesting “Did you know?”
statistics to make people interested to try vegetarian dishes in the university. The posters will
be developed on the basis of the information received from Healthcare students participating in
this activity.

Reference and Resources

There are no links related to this activity.