Tools

Guiding principles of the collection

  • understanding CSE concept
  • deepen CSE knowledge
  • instant usage → easy to use, prompt engagement
  • independent / diverse sources
  • conversation boosters
  • non-formal techniques

How to implement the embrace CSE process?

The EMBRACE CSE canvas will allow to understand how you can think about and/or promote CSE in your organisation’s cultures, strategies and ways of doing business.
    WHY USING A CANVAS?
  • To help to have a bigger picture of your overall business framework
  • To help you to organize your ideas in a simple, visual and practical
  • To create a new strategy
  • To discover new opportunities

Canvases / templates

The Context Map Canvas is a tool that helps you understand your market based on demographics, technology trends, competitors and other categories:
  • Demographic trends: What’s happening when it comes to education, employment, and social shifts? How are people voting? What about shifts in age and gender?
  • Technology trends: What technology trends might impact your business for better or for worse (or at least not better yet)? This isn’t just about mobile apps either. How do shifts to cloud storage, AI, big data, mobile and wearable tech, virtual reality, augmented reality, etc. show up in your market?
  • Rules and regulations: What rules and regulations — whether they’re new or existing ones — might affect your market? Scan the political news for these, as regulations are what politicians love to squabble about.
  • Economic climate: What contextual market trends do you see in the economy that might affect how your business, and others like it, operates in the future?
  • Customer needs: We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: your customers (and their wants and needs) are everything. It doesn’t matter what market you play in or what technology you’re building. If you don’t understand the needs of your customers your business will not succeed in the long run.
  • Competitors: What does the competition look like in your market? Try to find the unexpected competition. Are there new entries?
  • Uncertainties: With any contextual assessment of your market there will be a number of uncertainties. After all, you cannot know how the future will affect the market. You might even consider moving some of the stuff you added to other categories to this one.
Social Impact Wheel Review your innovation strategy and find out how your organization is impacting the 17 SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals by UN).
The Sustainable Business Model Canvas supports the development of an idea into a viable business model. It follows a holistic approach regarding the relationships within and outside the business. Besides economic criteria, it focuses on the ecological and social consequences of the activity
Backstacking invites us to start strategic conversations from a speculative future, by identifying the key differences between that future and today
Social Design Cookbook (note: this collection of practices focuses only on societal change and impact, not including financial sustainability aspects) The Social Design Cookbook is a colorful selection of replicable collaborative and cooperative formats. It presents 18 widely adopted models and practices of collaborative knowledge production, sharing, collective action and decision making. It also offers the ’social design canvas’, a design toolkit to aid individual and organisational efforts to understand, analyse, and design new cooperative social processes, which are independent of monetary motivations.
Partnership Flowchart helps you to see what partnership type is the most suitable in your case.

Conversation-booster tools

The trend cards stimulate and broaden your thinking and help you come up with new ideas and envision what the future could look like. All you need is the trend cards, a pen, paper and a couple of friends! More detailed instructions are provided on the instruction card. Following or setting new trends? - it’s up to you!
  • We are living in a rapidly changing environment. To make your venture viable it has to be future-proof. These trend cards help you to anticipate future tendencies. Following the instructions on the cards, think about how you can adapt and shape your business to future challenges? Consider what opportunities and difficulties these trends foreshadow to your business?
See the future! Slow down and ask the right questions. The Tarot Cards of Tech are a set of provocations designed to help creators more fully consider the impact of technology. They will not only help you to foresee unintended consequences - they can also reveal opportunities for creating positive change. To begin, simply click below - and see how the cards fall for you.
Draw a card and think about your business in terms of the question asked, i.e.:
If the environment was your client, how would your product change?
What happens when 100 people use your product?
Who or what disappears, if your product is successful?
Robert Gifford: the dragons of inactionMost people think climate change and sustainability are important problems, but too few global citizens engaged in high-greenhouse-gas-emitting behavior are engaged in enough mitigating behavior to stem the increasing flow of greenhouse gases and other environmental problems. Why is that? Structural barriers such as a climate-averse infrastructure are part of the answer, but psychological barriers also impede behavioral choices that would facilitate mitigation, adaptation, and environmental sustainability. Although many individuals are engaged in some ameliorative action, most could do more, but they are hindered by seven categories of psychological barriers, or "dragons of inaction": limited cognition about the problem, ideological worldviews that tend to preclude pro-environmental attitudes and behavior, comparisons with key other people, sunk costs and behavioral momentum, skepticism toward experts and authorities, perceived risks of change, and positive but inadequate behavior change. Structural barriers must be removed wherever possible, but this is unlikely to be sufficient. Psychologists must work with other scientists, technical experts, and policymakers to help citizens overcome these psychological barriers.
    Get to know all types of "the dragons of inaction".
  • Identify which ones are affecting you as a decision-maker or as an entrepreneur when taking environmental consequences into consideration?
  • What techniques and approaches can be used to overcome these psychological barriers?
Project Drawdown conducts an ongoing review and analysis of climate solutions—the practices and technologies that can stem and begin to reduce the excess of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. Our work shows the world can reach drawdown by mid-century if we make the best use of all existing climate solutions. Certainly, more solutions are needed and emerging, but there is no reason—or time—to wait on innovation. Now is better than new, and society is well equipped for transformation today.
    + Which of these provided solutions can you incorporate into your own business processes? If none, what obstacle do you face, what would you need?

Employment best practices – social inclusion

La Casa de Carlota is a Barcelona-based design studio that operates on a different business model. Their designer team includes people with Down's syndrome, autism and intellectual disabilities. They take CSR one step further to creative activism: this extremely diverse talent pool allows for less obvious approaches to design and creativity.
Signcoders inclusively employ hearing-impaired employees, they open up a software developer career for them. Linguistic research confirms that sign language users have a deeper experience in visual information processing. Experience has shown that engaging them in tasks that require visual skills often brings a new perspective to the team.

Serious games

A Foresight Game is a serious board game that teaches you to think critically and imaginatively about emerging technology and the future of society. Designed by the foresight strategists at Idea Couture, IMPACT invites participants to take on professions of the future and navigate change in order to achieve their character’s preferred future state.
    Through playing the game, participants will:
  • → Learn the basics of future thinking including some of the key terminologies
  • → Learn about the latest advances in science and technology (neurotech, nanotech, artificial intelligence, IoT, biotech, robotics)
  • → Practice thinking about how these emerging technologies could evolve and the various ways they could influence society
EnterMode is a serious game that supports the acquisition of entrepreneurial skills and mindset. The serious game develops six entrepreneurial competencies out of the 15 included in the EntreComp framework which was a significant source in CSE competences framework development as well:
  • Creativity
  • Vision
  • Mobilising resources
  • Spotting opportunities
  • Coping with uncertainty, ambiguity and risk
  • Working with others
This role-playing board game helps Master’s students think about strategic decision-making in the context of four different pathways towards a sustainable future by 2050. Players representing established businesses interact with players representing entrepreneurs, policymakers, civil society organizations and ‘the public voice’ as they all react to changes in the economy, technology, and society along these pathways. The ‘winners’ are judged not only by the amount of resources they have accumulated, but also by whether they have achieved their purpose, and the teams reflect on the nature of the world they have collectively created through their decisions. The game has been developed by the Sustainability group at Cranfield University.
Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity – the so-called VUCA world – are the environment we live and work in today and in the future. To succeed, individuals, teams and organisations need to improve their ability to adapt. A game-based leadership training program opens the gateway to building adaptive leadership competencies using story-driven experiential learning for a memorable training experience.
This book has become a favorite of K–12 teachers, university faculty, and corporate consultants. It provides short gaming exercises that illustrate the subtleties of systems thinking. The companion DVD shows the authors introducing and running each of the thirty games.
The thirty games are classified by these areas of learning: Systems Thinking, Mental Models, Team Learning, Shared Vision, and Personal Mastery. Each description clearly explains when, how, and why the game is useful. There are explicit instructions for debriefing each exercise as well as a list of all required materials. A summary matrix has been added for a quick glance at all thirty games. When you are in a hurry to find just the right initiative for some part of your course, the matrix will help you find it.
Enhance local, circular, sustainable trade with mutual credit & resource mapping Business owners and entrepreneurs are often the most important agents behind kickstarting a larger ecosystem of mutual credit. They may also have the most to gain, since the added purchasing power in the local economy and stability to weather external financial shocks are great advantages for small and medium-sized enterprises.
Commonspoly is a non-profit, open-source board game that encourages a culture of cooperation and questions the violent model of neoliberal privatisation.
Financial crises are occurring with ever-increasing frequency, and global unemployment is rising sharply. The climate crisis is already frighteningly urgent, while pandemics threaten the total collapse of society. In this game, as in reality, you’re in a race against time and need all the help you can get to bring about change.
Commonspoly emerged in 2015 as a way to hack and subvert the contemporary version of Monopoly. Just like in the original, each space on the board provides goods or other resources, but in Commonspoly these goods can be Private, Public or Commons, and the challenge, rather than competing to accumulate goods, is to create a society in which working together furthers the common good.