Every month, partners and associates of the GRLI gather for what we call Pulse — a working session where we try to connect the dots across the dispersed field. Scattered together, we show up at AACSB, at EFMD, at AABS and PRME or the Academy of Management and other platforms; Pulse is how we make sense, together, of what we’re each noticing from where we stand.
This is a selective reflection from our third 2026 Pulse, which brought voices from New Zealand to Hamburg, from Cape Town to Melbourne to Copenhagen and Bali. As always, this write-up is shared with participants’ sign-off, and anything that needed sanitising has been.
What the room was carrying
Darija Miletic opened with a simple question: what’s most present for you as you arrive? And people didn’t hold back.
There was weather — it was raining on almost every continent represented — but that was never quite the point. What arrived in the room was a shared unease about the conditions under which business education tries to do good work right now. Lavinia-Cristina Iosif-Lazar (Copenhagen Business School) named something several others were also circling: “The sustainability action still needs to be done. They’re kind of taking a second step, or a third, or a fourth.” Sustainability, once commanding the top of institutional agendas, is losing ground as other risks — geopolitical, financial, political — push in. The urgency hasn’t gone away. The bandwidth has. Picking up Lavinia’s point about shifting discourse, John offered a reframe. If “sustainability” is the word losing ground – increasingly politicised, narrowed, and in some quarters quietly dropped – then perhaps the more durable framing is “global responsibility”: broader, harder to caricature, and less easily claimed or dismissed by any single political camp. It moves the conversation from a contested label toward a shared obligation, which may be exactly what lets the work continue when the terminology around it is under pressure.
In Australia, Farah Azmat (Deakin Business School) put the pressure plainly: declining student numbers, driven by visa restrictions, rising living costs, and regional competition, are eroding revenue. “With this funding constraint, we still want to invest in quality education, quality research, sustainability initiatives. I’m just wondering whether collaboration is the key.” It was a question that echoed around the room more than once.
And beneath all of it, concern about political climates in several countries making it harder for universities to speak publicly, engage civically, or fund responsible leadership work. Paul Ballantine (University of Canterbury) named what’s at stake: “the disempowerment and isolation that a number of our young people will feel.” His hope — and his work — is in giving the next generation tools to navigate a world that can leave them feeling at the margins.
What’s being tried
The Impact Innovation Circles are deepening. Darija described them as a direct response to a gap partners keep naming: “We are incubating quite a lot of very interesting things in silos. How do we break the silos and start connecting the dots on a global scale?” Two circles have been running since late 2025, with global representation across institutions including Deakin, KLU, Copenhagen Business School and Exeter. Emerging pathways include behavioural change in students and faculty, experiential learning as catalytic pedagogy, how we assess impact and competencies both externally and internally, and storytelling.
The arithmetic behind this matters. Through strategic partners EFMD and AACSB, GRLI theoretically reaches roughly 2,000 business schools. If small circles of six to nine institutions distil their learning and pay it forward to seed new circles, a meaningful share of those schools could be actively transforming curriculum and pedagogy by 2030 — a positive tipping point in and through business education. Hence the name of the wider inquiry: BE the Tipping Point.
GRL4ST, our collaborative course, is in its fourth year and remains a model available to any three or more partners willing to build a multi-institutional offering. The framework is proven, there’s no additional GRLI cost, and it runs low-touch on Google Classroom — partners bring the modules and the students.
A tension worth holding
The Inner Development Goals surfaced more than once, and brought a productive tension with them.
Julie from Exeter, newly an IDG Ambassador and starting a hub, pushed back gently on how the work tends to be read: “It’s also misunderstood that inner development is supposed to be a collective thing — you’re doing it through collaborating and asking other people.” The fluffiness, she suggested, is partly a messaging problem.
John surfaced the honest question underneath. Poorly framed, “inner development could be seen potentially as a kind of luxury pursuit for those in a very privileged position.” The work, he suggested, has to be balanced with structural reform — ensuring there’s social and environmental justice in the system itself.
Whether the framework travels across very different conditions is now an empirical question, not just a rhetorical one. The findings aren’t yet in. This is a live tension, not a settled one, and it deserves more than a footnote in how we position the work.
There may be a Crucial Conversation worth convening here.
Where collaboration becomes possible
This is the part of Pulse where offers and asks land — and this call was unusually full of them.
- Undergraduate collaborative course. Morris (University of Dundee) is open to leading an undergraduate companion to GRL4ST. Three or more partners needed. Contact GRLI to put your hand up.
- Textbook on real-world economics. Morris is exploring a textbook connecting economics to the SDGs and beyond — including the role of democracy in development. Publisher likely secured. Co-authors and contributors welcome; reach out to Morris directly.
- Alternative journals list. Given recent changes to the FT50 and the reorientation of AACSB and EQUIS toward research with social impact (alongside DORA), Morris is developing a list of high-quality, non-mainstream journals to support academics doing non-traditional work. Contributors and testers welcome.
- Structured research collaboration and guest lectures. Morris is keen on lighter-weight ways to collaborate across universities — guest lectures, shared seminars, online research exchange — for those without big budgets. This connects to his new WISED (Workshop on Institutional and Socioeconomic Development) at Dundee, running hybrid meetings with visiting speakers.
- Biodiversity in Business — Copenhagen Business School. Lavinia hosts monthly online coffee meetings through the PRME Working Group on Climate and Environment, open to anyone bridging biodiversity science and business education. A teaching case collection on biodiversity in business is also emerging. Speakers welcome; reach out to Lavinia directly.
- Environmental Restorative Justice in business education. Julie (Exeter) is part of the European Forum for Restorative Justice working group exploring the place of environmental restorative justice in business and university education, and would welcome others interested in the theme.
- Inner Development Goals hub at Exeter. Julie, newly an IDG Ambassador, has started a hub and is open to connecting with anyone exploring the goals. Mias (Stellenbosch) offered to connect interested people with a PhD student whose research compares IDGs in emerging economies in Africa and South America — directly relevant to the tension above.
- Maths anxiety resources — Exeter. Julie and the Exeter Science Centre have produced neuroscience-informed videos for students on maths anxiety, and she’s keen to connect with researchers on quantitative skill-building, including comparative work across countries.
- Deepening ABDC engagement. Paul (University of Canterbury) is in active contact with the new ABDC president and is willing to strengthen connections and help carry context as GRLI looks to strengthen that relationship.
- Upcoming gatherings to mark. PRME ANZ Chapter Annual Forum at Deakin, 25 November 2026 (Fara). ABDC 2026 Conference at RMIT, 23–24 November 2026, themed Navigating Uncertain Horizons (Paul). International Cooperative Alliance research meeting at Monash, 6–7 October 2026 (Morris).
The GRLI office is also working actively on closer alignment with the regional associations — AABS, CLADEA, AAPBS, CABS, ABDC — and welcomes input from partners on how best to do this without overloading governance. The ecosystem calendar lives at lu.ma/the-grli.
Closing
As Mias offered at the checkout: “If we all just start with what we have and working together, things will change.” Or, as the GRLI tagline goes — think big, act small, start now.
Pulse meets again next month. Come with what you’re sensing, what’s keeping you awake, and one experiment — however small — worth sharing.
