The Aspen Institute Business & Society Program has announced the eight winners of its 2021 Ideas Worth Teaching Awards, including Wharton professor Kevin Werbach.

The Aspen Institute’s Business & Society Program recognizes the power of business school teaching to influence the culture embedded within capitalism and, as a result, has been honoring innovative faculty since 1999. In a sign of the rising interest in social impact in business, this year’s nominations for the awards rose by 40%.

The eight winning finalists were chosen from a pool of nominations representing 90 schools from 19 countries from every continent except Antarctica. But beyond the numbers, it is the content of the courses that reflects the historic nature of this moment, said Jaime Bettcher, program manager of the Aspen Institute Business & Society Program and overseer of the awards selection process.

With this history in mind, Ms. Bettcher sees great potential in the example set by this year’s winning courses. “There is immense power in business practice – the collective and normalized decision-making across corporations and global markets – to affect health, economic and environmental inequities; to affect how governments function and how public goods are protected and sustained.

“History teaches us that these efforts in a moment of crisis would in time lay the foundations for prosperity and social progress in the decades that follow. We believe that the courses recognized among this year’s winners point the way for a world on stronger and more just foundations in the future.”

Kevin Werbach, the Liem Sioe Liong/First Pacific Company Professor in legal studies and business ethics, as well as the chair of the department of legal studies and business ethics in the Wharton School, won one of the eight awards for his course Big Data, Big Responsibilities: The Laws and Ethics of Business Analytics.