Ecosa Capital

Innovation & Entrepreneurship: Clean Energy Opportunities
Taught at UC Berkeley
Offered through the School of Engineering

This course is designed to acquaint students with opportunity areas within clean energy and with methods for integrating entrepreneurship and market forces to catalyze environmental change.  Within this class, clean technology innovations in energy, water, waste, materials, manufacturing and communications will be analyzed for commercialization potential.  Students will examine the role of markets in environmentalism (and vice versa), and learn how to apply the principles of market forces for positive environmental and economic outcomes.

Through readings, discussion, and interaction with guest speakers, students will examine and critically evaluate current trends in clean energy entrepreneurship and investigate skills needed by entrepreneurs including the ability to recognize new opportunities, develop a winning strategy, raise capital, identify and mitigate risk, and build and manage effective organizations.  Case studies, guest lectures, class discussions, and a final project help to integrate innovative business and entrepreneurship methods with relation to environmental issues.

After completing this course, students will understand market failure concepts in order to ascertain opportunities to use market-based approaches to solve environmental problems; understand and practice the entrepreneurial process; have the ability to match environmental technology innovations with market trends to uncover potential business ideas; identify environmental technology innovations currently being researched with an eye toward real-life application and commercialization; and be able to create potential solutions to such problems that have both positive economic and environmental impacts.

Social Entrepreneurship
Taught at UC Berkeley
Offered through the Haas School of Business

This course will explore various definitions, motivations, forms, and implementations of Social Entrepreneurship – the use of business skills to develop innovative for-profit and non-profit ventures that aim to achieve social, environmental, and financial impact on societal problems through their products, services and business practices.

The course activities and lessons will investigate and discuss applying entrepreneurial concepts to a variety of market failures such as food, education, health, environment, energy, labor, international development, etc. Through readings, discussion, and interaction with guest speakers, students will examine and critically evaluate current trends in social entrepreneurship and investigate skills needed by social entrepreneurs including the ability to recognize new opportunities, develop a winning strategy, raise capital, identify and mitigate risk, and build and manage effective organizations.

After completing this course, students will have an understanding of how social enterprises function as businesses, how and why entrepreneurs successfully work to blend often disparate goals; how vision and values embedded into organizational culture affect success, and how to manage, measure, and report on the success of social-minded ventures.