One of the most intriguing visits for me during the trip was with Suitable for Business. A Copenhagen based collective of students or a movement as they like to call themselves, Suitable for Business searches for novel ways to bring business and humanities together. Started in 2011 by philosophy students, SfB found home at the Copenhagen Business School.

Founding member and chairman of SfB, an enthusiastic yet calm and collected Matias Sondergaard took us through the basic premises of the movement. “We want to find ways to use our humanistic view of the world to benefit businesses. Academic skills from outside the economics can and should be used in improving the world of business.”

According to the SfB Manifesto or the ten commandments of the movement, humanistic businesses are ones that “are built upon morality, empathy and a link to culture. Moreover they aspire for creative solutions”. The more we chatted, the more I realized Torstai and SfB have in common. I for one definitely subscribe to Matias’s view, that society at large can only benefit from those shared values created through humanities and social sciences entering the world of business. Instead of battling business, as has traditionally been the case for students from the aforementioned disciplines, why not find ways to incorporate  values and ideas created through them into business life and change it for the better?

What SfB does in practice is organize an annual conference and case competition. At the conference lectures and speeches are given by representatives from both businesses and the academia. The case competition brings together multidisciplinary teams of students to work on a specific case in which their individual skills and knowledge can be combined in a group effort. The first case competition in 2011 was organized in collaboration with the Danish Red Cross. You can learn more about the competition and the way SfB works at www.suitableforbusiness.dk/#Home

Walking away from the meeting I was left with a strengthened feeling that what I’m doing with Torstai can find resonance and sympathies among a wider audience of students that I had ever imagined. I was also super inspired to develop the way we work and start to think about the open road of possibilities ahead for our co-operative.

Mika Hyötyläinen, Torstai Helsinki