From Sustainability to Regeneration: Why Business Education Needs a More Connected Approach

What if sustainability in business was not just about reducing harm?

What if it was also about restoring systems, strengthening relationships, and helping people experience their role in creating a better future?

reSBMI builds actionable connections solving sustainability needs together. The Sustainability Lens Game - shows you how.

That is the central question behind my forthcoming chapter on regenerative experiential sustainable business model innovation (reSBMI). This new framework builds on sustainable business model innovation (SBMI) by bringing together three connected ideas: sustainable business model innovation, regenerative business, and experiential learning. Together, they offer a more complete way to think about how ventures can create value not only economically, socially, and environmentally, but also in ways that renew systems and transform the people involved in them.

For years, sustainability work in business has often focused on doing less damage. That matters. But today’s challenges ask more of us. Climate instability, social inequity, and resource stress require us to move beyond efficiency and mitigation toward restoration, reciprocity, resilience, and shared responsibility. In other words, the future of business must be more regenerative, more relational, and more participatory.

This is where reSBMI comes in.

ReSBMI is a way of understanding business model innovation that goes further than embedding sustainability into strategy. It asks: How can a business contribute positively to the health of social and ecological systems? And how can it create value through immersive, educational, collaborative, and transformative experiences for stakeholders? In this view, innovation is not something a company does alone. It becomes a shared process of experimentation, learning, and co-creation.

But here is the challenge: these ideas can be difficult to teach.

Students, entrepreneurs, and community leaders are often asked to think across economic, environmental, and social dimensions all at once. They must balance viability, responsibility, stakeholder interests, creativity, and systems thinking. That complexity can feel overwhelming when it is taught only through abstract concepts or static frameworks. Your head may understand the theory, but that does not always mean you know how to practice it.

That is why I believe we need more experiential, playful, and connected ways of learning.

The Sustainability Lens Game was created for exactly this purpose. The game helps people engage sustainability not as a checklist, but as a living, relational, problem-solving process. It combines micro-sustainability tools, the Sustainable Development Goals, and the Business Model Canvas in a structured but creative format that helps players generate regenerative business solutions. Supported by the educational technology (edtech) tool Sustainability Sam, the game acts as both a learning scaffold and a practical solutions generator.

In the game, participants work individually and together to turn sustainability concepts into actionable business stories. Through timed turns, collaboration, and “coopetition,” players learn how to connect ideas, negotiate trade-offs, and imagine new possibilities. Because it is a game, the process lowers fear, encourages risk-taking, and creates a psychologically safe environment for innovation. That matters deeply when people are confronting the complexity of sustainability and regeneration.

What I find especially exciting is that this approach does more than teach content.

It helps cultivate the kinds of capacities regenerative leadership requires: empathy, systems thinking, confidence, responsibility, creativity, trust, and collaboration. In the chapter’s academic research study with Suffolk University Sawyer Business School students, findings suggest that the Sustainability Lens Game helped strengthen personal responsibility, motivation, and intent around sustainability leadership, while also translating theory into entrepreneurial action. The game became a bridge between understanding sustainability and feeling capable of doing something with it.

That bridge is essential.

If we want future entrepreneurs and managers to build enterprises that are resilient, inclusive, and restorative, then we need educational tools that engage the whole learner — intellectually, emotionally, socially, and imaginatively. Regeneration cannot just be taught as a concept. It must also be experienced.

The author's workstation. Chapter almost finished!

The Sustainability Lens Game helps make that possible by inviting people into a more connected approach to business innovation. It shows that sustainable business model innovation is not only about designing better enterprises. It is also about shaping better relationships, better systems, and better ways of learning together. That is the promise of reSBMI.

As this chapter comes out, I am excited to continue the conversation about how we can move from sustainability to regeneration — and how play, storytelling, and collaboration can help us get there.

Blog Author: Dr. Tamara Stenn