Impact Courses You Won’t Want to Miss in Winter 2026
BUSINESS
FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS
LBLE – Living Business Leadership Experience (BA 655)
Professor: Mike Barger | Credits: 3
Winter 2026
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FOR UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS
LBLE – Living Business Leadership Experience (BA 455)
Professor: Mike Barger | Credits: 3
Winter 2026
Living Business Leadership Experience (LBLE) is a 3.0 credit-hour Ross elective course where graduate and upper-level undergraduate students from across the University collaborate to shape, implement, and lead high-impact business initiatives alongside company founders and senior leaders. Whether you’re interested in learning business by doing business, working in a cross-functional team, or navigating complex and ambiguous business environments, this course will give you the chance to develop your leadership skills and dive headfirst into the challenges of business. One of our sponsors, Lacuum, is building a business to help remove contaminants from lakes and ponds through the deployment of autonomous vehicles and AI.
Learn How to Join. To learn more about upcoming Winter 2026 enrollment, email ross-lble@umich.edu
FOR UNDERGRADUATE & GRADUATE STUDENTS
Innovation for Urban Impact (ENTR 419)
Professor: David Tarver
Credits: 3 | Winter 2026
In Innovation for Urban Impact you will experience what it takes to make lasting improvements in urban quality-of-life by creating or enhancing innovative for-profit businesses. Student teams work in partnership with an urban-focused business to increase impact via business model innovation and application of new technology. Students develop, validate, and present a “new and improved” business model and marketing strategy for their partner business. Skills practiced in this course are applicable to a wide range of entrepreneurial and general business pursuits.
FOR UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS
Charting Your Path: Leadership, Purpose, and Impact (MO 330)
Professor: Kevin Thompson
Credits: 3 | Winter 2026
Charting Your Path is a self-leadership course for students adrift in a sea of expectations who are exceptional at fulfilling goals set by others but find themselves too busy to reflect on whether they are the right thing to do. The goal of the course is to help you authentically lead yourself and others — everyday, in ways large and small. To achieve this goal, Charting Your Path explores personalized pursuits of purpose, mental fitness, and significance in service of an impactful career.
The course includes a one-week wilderness expedition in Utah’s Canyonlands with the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) which runs at the conclusion of winter term before summer internships. Charting Your Path has 12 classroom sessions of 90 minutes each utilizing and applying rigorous, science-based frameworks and experiential formats.
SUSTAINABILITY
FOR UNDERGRADUATE & MM STUDENTS
Social and Environmental Responsibility and Marketing (MKT 470)
Professor: Burcu Tasoluk
Credits: 3 | Winter 2026
This course will cover interactions between society and marketing and marketing’s role and responsibility (in both environmental and social issues) in society. We will take a triple bottom line (People, Planet, Profit) perspective when evaluating these interactions. As such, the impact of social and environmental concerns on marketing actions, consumer behavior and company performance will be discussed in detail. Diverse perspectives from business ethics, strategy, economics, psychology, and sociology will help students adopt different lenses while analyzing a complex array of contemporary marketing issues. We will be using case studies throughout the course and students will have the opportunity to work collaboratively with peers and to discuss a broad set of interesting topics. Course topics will include Social Sustainability, Environmental Sustainability, Consumer Attitudes toward Sustainable Marketing, Social Influences on Responsible Consumer Behavior, Corporate Social & Environmental Initiatives, Marketing & AI, Brand Activism, and Brand Purpose. Please note that MKT 470 is approved as an elective for the Erb Undergraduate Fellows program curriculum. Ross students who are Erb Fellows can get this course counted towards the 12 credits coursework requirement.
FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS
Sustainable Operations and Supply Chain Management (TO 560)
Professor: Ravi Anupindi
Credits: 2.25 | Winter 2026(A)
Firms today face increasing pressure from activists, investors, and customers, to reduce the environmental impacts of their operations and supply chains as well as uphold basic human rights and labor standards for the people who produce the materials/ components/ products. How is responsibility (for ensuring sustainability) apportioned across the extended value chain that includes the end consumers? This course examines how to design and manage environmentally and socially responsible operations and supply chains.
FOR UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS
Energy Economics and Policy (ECON 437)
Professor: Jingyuan Wang
Credits: 3 | Winter 2026
This course is about energy markets. It is designed to help students make connections between economic concepts and real world regulatory policy questions and issues. The emphasis is on the insights that economic theory and empirical evidence can provide when thinking about the following questions: How do energy markets work? When should the government regulate energy markets? What can the structure of energy markets tells us about how to design and implement effective economic policy?
POLICY AND LAW
FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS
Anti-Oppressive and Transformative Justice Approaches to Community Change (SW 798)
Professors: Trevor Bechtel
Credits: 1 | Winter 2026
This course will focus on anti-oppressive organizing and transformative justice approaches to creating community change. It will explore the theory and concepts behind such approaches as well as the specific skills needed to engage in anti-oppressive, anti-racist and transformative organizing work with a focus on power and root causes analysis.The course will draw from contemporary grassroots and social movement models of practice including emergent strategy, healing and restorative justice, digital and arts-based justice efforts, and other related examples.
FOR UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS
Entrepreneurship Exchange
Winter 2026
The Entrepreneurship Exchange brings together students from the U.S., Morocco, Libya and Egypt in small teams to identify market opportunities and develop business concepts that address real-world needs. Through this virtual certificate program, you’ll gain practical experience in civic-minded entrepreneurship. The program culminates in a video pitch competition. Once all three cohorts are complete, the winning teams will also participate in four live group mentoring sessions with a University of Michigan entrepreneurship professor.