Existential Sustainability For Twin Transition in Finnish and Danish Applied Business Education

This article explores the concept of existential sustainability in applied education within the twin transition context. Drawing on collaborative experiences from Finnish Xamk and Danish UCL, we highlight how integrating human social and existential aspects can enhance the impact of sustainability initiatives for students and teachers. International practical examples demonstrate that fostering an “outside-the-box” mindset and cross-disciplinary collaboration supports better innovation results in applied higher education. We argue that genuine sustainable development requires moving beyond traditional environmental and economic goals to address the complex socio-existential realities in a rapidly changing twin-transition world. 

Introduction of existential sustainability concept in applied education 

Sustainability is fundamentally about creating lasting value without consuming more resources than can be regenerated (Von Carlowitz 2022, Rosa 2013). In practice, however, sustainability is far more complex, as improvements in an environmental area often lead to unforeseen consequences in another social, cultural, and economic realms. Necessity of a good, wellbeing life, especially during twin transition, is emphasised by the existential sustainability concept (Persson 2024).  

It is often suggested that a fruitful way in for many organizations to adopt sustainable transitions, is to engage in an iterative development of a combined effort of making digital innovation and sustainability initiatives in concert, a so called “twin transition”. (see e.g. Kilinc et al. 2025) In this way of thinking, Technology driven innovation is at the core of sustainable development and making innovative digital solutions that may help optimize green solutions.  The question remains, however, if there are any related social effects, that may make a twin transition non-sustainable in the triple-bottom line sense (Storm-Henningsen 2014). We believe that these concepts introduced and discussed by Persson are valuable to the discussion of sustainability, particularly when it comes to the practical implementation of policies in organizations.  

Aspects of human life’s existence and social wellbeing are put afront, when Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are being gradually achieved by 2030 (Existential sustainability 2024). Therefore, working with sustainability in applied education and business projects requires a constant balancing of environmental, economic, and social considerations. It is precisely within this complexity that new concepts such as existential sustainability become relevant, focusing on meaning, identity, and well-being during processes of change. 

The gradual transition from the value system of Technology 4.0 to Technology 5.0 implies a particular importance of human socio-cultural indicators. Technology is already reaching a peak of progress in certain industries (Fogaça et al. 2025). For the digitally native generation, studying under twin transition digital and green technological solutions is self-evident and presents frankly no difficulty. In other words, green digital solutions are a modern given. However, this leads to ‘inside-the-box’ locked solutions. Human, intergenerational, and ontological issues are often overlooked. As a result, students propose over-smart solutions where achieving environmental and economic indicators should yield socially sustainable benefits.

But this is precisely not the case. The introduction of existential sustainability presupposes a qualitative shift in the value system within the twin transition. For example, instead of profitability indicators and calculations of gross or marginal GDP, attention should be paid to human capital indices, happiness ratings of countries and residents, the relative social benefits of the population, intergenerational continuity, and many other related indicators. This is what will ensure the evolution of the twin transition from the digital and ecological axes (components of Industry 4.0) to the inclusion of the existential axis (the foundations of Industry 5.0). 

It is possible that this is indeed implicit in Perssons ideas of existential sustainability, but for practical reasons we suggest an explication in the form of a third dimension which we might label existential distance, and which has alienation and resonance at the extremes. Since it also has to work as a utilitarian measure, where we calculate if the change in value affects, or are affected by change in value on the other aspects of the triple bottom line, we might conceive it as an axis where we move in the direction towards alienation, that is increased distance when we “loose value”, and on the other hand we move in the direction of resonance when we increase value, (that is, increased immersion/decreased distance). 

Finnish and Danish business teaching experiences on existential sustainability  

An important place to engage into this issue, is of course management education. The authors of this paper have during many years of collaboration and shared experiences, worked on didactical tools to engage students in an existential-sustainability-entrepreneurial mindset.  

Questions of human well-being and happiness at the national level are particularly prominent in social learning in Finnish applied programs. Finland has held a leading position in the national happiness index for many years (The World Happiness Report 2025). However, in business education, this potential remains largely underutilized in teaching innovative courses compared to social programs. For example, an innovative project in the field of digital green technologies might begin with the question, ”What will make our everyday lives happier?” Only after defining a system of values ​​and goals for happiness can one move on to questions at the economic and technological level. 

We made a joint intensive module on ”Innovation Sustainability = Sustainable Innovation” in Finland at Xamk “Sustainable Growth” MBA course that can be considered as an applied example. At the beginning of this workshop, it was important to ask the students, what innovation, sustainability, and creativity are. Surprisingly, a unanimous, comprehensive definition of these concepts and a unified opinion among the group are lacking. Discussing these matters with MBA students at XAMK in Finland, we experienced a lot of engagement (Nemilentsev 2023). Many came up with examples of the issues the existential sustainability discussion from their own practice, and changed the topics of various assignments and theses, after this framework was presented to them.  

Another way to demonstrate existential sustainability in practice was to include an amateur in a group of professionals in one recent international innovation project within Xamk forest economics. The best results on digital sustainability were achieved by a mini group, in which hospitality business students asked seemingly basic and even unrelated questions to forest economics experts. But it was precisely through this pestering of ”non-professionals” that the entire group, and subsequently the commissioning company itself, began to think outside the box, incorporating a number of practical socio-cultural aspects into the previously exclusively ecological-economic discussion. 

In Denmark, for example, the UCL uses AI-generated group members. This means that three or four students in mini groups solving innovative sustainable challenges are assigned a digital group member who focuses primarily on social and existential human values. In this way, each technologically ”green” but correct, yet narrowly focused solution of the real students is complemented by existentially significant imperatives. Furthermore, the AI ​​model prevents solutions from being overly clever and fosters continuity between generations of stakeholders —meaning socially diverse solutions emerge out of the box. 

Also, with entrepreneurship students at UCL in Denmark, a whole six-week module is devoted to discussion of promoting the 21^st century skills and the good life, both in private life, volunteer work and relating to career and job. And the student report that the opportunity to discuss their own dreams and goals in life, though in a structured and professional setting, feels liberating and resonates with their work on creating sustainable entrepreneurship projects, though it is somewhat baffling at first. 

Conclusion 

Sustainable development must be integrated into all levels of applied education, not just as environmental goals but also by addressing existential human questions, social identity, and socio-technological collaboration. Too often, sustainability is reduced to environmental parameters, overlooking crucial socio-cultural aspects.

Our Finnish and Danish applied educational experience shows that genuine impact arises when research, development, and teaching are closely linked across disciplines and institutions to social existential aspects, especially when teaching sustainability innovations and digital transition. By moving beyond traditional “inside-the-box” thinking and fostering active collaboration among Technology 4.0 and Technology 5.0 green-digital-human dimensions, we can better equip students, teaching staff and partner organizations to navigate complex sustainability challenges and create lasting value for society (Figure 1). 

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