SEMESTER: Fall 2019
COURSE NUMBER: EWMBA 212A.1
To ensure that C2M teams can begin meaningful
work on the first day of class, C2M DOES NOT ALLOW ADD/DROP. This is consistent with other client-based
consulting courses at Haas.
This
course is dual-listed with the FTMBA Program.
COURSE TITLE: Cleantech
to Market
UNITS OF CREDIT: 3
units
INSTRUCTORS: Beverly Alexander, Brian Steel, & Bill Shelander
E-MAIL ADDRESSES:
balexander@berkeley.edu, bsteel@berkeley.edu,
shelander@berkeley.edu
CLASS WEB PAGE LOCATIONS:
http://ei.haas.berkeley.edu/education/c2m/,
http://ei.haas.berkeley.edu/education/c2m/c2m-course.html,
http://ei.haas.berkeley.edu/education/c2m/course-details.html
MEETING DAY(S)/TIME: T/Th, 11-12:30 plus
team meetings outside of class.
PREREQUISITE(S): No
prerequisites; however, Energy & Environmental Markets is helpful.
CAREER FIELD: The many industries
that comprise cleantech, including low carbon energy, environment, green
chemistry and water. Also skills that
cross industries, such as finance, product development, project management, and
manufacturing.
CLASS FORMAT:
·
Class discussions (which generally
include an instructor-led portion, except for those comprising team
presentations to one another)
·
Guest speakers (which always include a
substantive Q&A portion with the class)
·
Lectures (even these include some class
engagement)
·
Public symposium (the teams’ final
presentations after Thanksgiving)
·
Teamwork in class (almost all of these
sessions involve instructor coaching—some mandatory, some optional)
As
a three-unit course at Haas, class members are expected to spend twice the time
in class, i.e., an additional six hours per week, on course-related activities.
For C2M, this comprises research, interviews with subject matter experts, and
various types of team meetings.
REQUIRED READINGS:
Given the dynamic nature of cleantech markets, C2M develops a custom reading
list every year tailored to the projects in the course. Because most cleantech
information is out of date by the time it is published, many of our readings
are from the Internet.
BASIS FOR FINAL GRADE: 70%
team performance: market report (~100 pages, half
analysis and half interview notes and appendices) and symposium presentation
(30-minute presentation to a public
symposium of 200+ cleantech professionals and a one-hour debriefing with your
scientist). 30% individual performance: teamwork and participation,
including peer feedback surveys.
ABSTRACT OF COURSE'S CONTENT AND
OBJECTIVES:
Cleantech
to Market is a cross-disciplinary, capstone project course in which graduate
students apply their core courses as well as business, engineering, scientific,
and legal knowledge to help define and improve pathways to market for cleantech
research. Students are drawn from up to 20 different graduate programs at UCB
including Haas, the College of Engineering, the Energy & Resources Group,
many science programs, Berkeley Law and the Goldman School of Public Policy.
C2M
provides commercialization support for clean tech from cutting edge startups.
Now in its 10th year, C2M has served over 300 entrepreneurs & researchers
from the Cleantech Open, Cyclotron Road, ARPA-E, DOE, CEC, UC Berkeley,
Stanford, Caltech, Princeton, MIT, LBL and many more. Over 15-weeks every fall semester, C2M provides 1,000 hours of free
commercialization assessment, market research and highly refined
recommendations for each project, including the identification of early-stage
target markets, commercialization pathways, performance specifications, and
funding sources. Students work in four- to six-person teams and
collaborate as a class to support each other’s work. In addition, each team
interviews at least 40 subject matter experts and reviews at least 40 different
written sources on their technology. The
course culminates in teams presenting their findings (1) at an all-day, public
seminar for ~ 200 energy industry professionals and (2) privately to their
technology partners.
For further details, see C2M’s
sample Syllabus at http://ei.haas.berkeley.edu/education/c2m/docs/Cleantech%20to%20Market%20Sample%20Syllabus%20.pdf We update the syllabus every year to support the
new round of projects.
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES:
Brian Steel is Co-Director of the Cleantech to
Market program to which he brings 30 years of business innovation and
leadership experience. He is a member of the Haas "Club of 6" for
teaching excellence. He is a member of the external advisory board of the
Innovation Incubation (a Wells Fargo/NREL joint venture). He was also a Senior
Advisor to Renewable Energy Trust and an advisor to the Berkeley Startup
Cluster. In addition, he has served as an advisor to the Department of Energy,
working on both renewable energy financing and solar initiatives. Prior to
joining the UC Berkeley faculty, Brian was Vice President of Corporate Strategy
& Development for PG&E Corporation, where he led the energy industry’s first
tax-equity solar project financing by an investor-owned utility, investing $400
million in nearly $1 billion of photovoltaic assets from 2010-2011. Prior roles
include Chairman, International, Pandora Media – the world’s leading Internet
radio company; President, International, Overture Services – building a
billion-dollar division of Yahoo! with operations in 20 countries; President
and CEO, Idealab Silicon Valley and Managing Director
of Idealab; and President and COO, On Command.
Previously, Brian was Senior Vice President and co-head of the Real Estate
Merchant Banking Group at Shearson Lehman Brothers. He has served on the boards
of more than 20 early-stage technology companies, several of which went public,
and many of which had successful acquisition exits. His separate angel
investments include Back to the Roots (founded by Haas alumni), Birdies, LiveOps, Pangenera, and Powerset (sold to Microsoft). Brian holds a B.A. magna cum
laude in Economics from Duke University, where he was an Angier B. Duke
Scholar.
Send
an email to bsteel@berkeley.edu
Beverly Alexander is the Founding Director of the
Cleantech to Market program, and has been involved in energy and environmental
innovation for almost 30 years. Bev serves
as an advisor to the Berkeley Energy & Resources Collaborative, and won the
2013 Berkeley-Haas Best Case award for a cleantech commercialization case study
on Alphabet Energy. She is also a member
of the Haas Club of 6 for excellence in teaching. As a Senior Vice-President at Pacific Gas
& Electric Company, she was in charge of customer services and the largest
energy efficiency, solar, and demand response programs in the United States.
Those programs moved $1.2 billion into the California economy and won over 75
awards, including the United States Department of Energy's Energy Star
Sustained Excellence award. Bev also held Director, Chief Counsel, and Vice
President positions in generation, transmission, distribution and customer
services, with a focus on leadership development and strategic planning. Before
PG&E, Bev specialized in emerging environmental law and policy. The
National Law Journal recognized her as one of the top 40 attorneys under the
age of 40 in the United States for her pioneering work. After PG&E, Bev
consulted on clean energy solutions, including sustainable communities. She
received her B.A. in Environmental Studies from UC Santa Cruz and her J.D. from
UC Berkeley, where she was Editor-in-Chief of Ecology Law Quarterly, and clerked
on the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Send
an email to balexander@berkeley.edu
Bill Shelander joined the C2M faculty in 2016
after serving as an advisor and mentor to the program since 2010. Bill brings
hands-on proficiency at the earliest stages of emerging technologies and
venture funding. He is also teaching the Environmental Entrepreneurship and
Innovation program at Stanford University’s School of Civil and Environmental
Engineering introducing methods and insights to conceive and implement
economically viable enterprises enabling environmentally sustainable systems.
He was a commercialization expert for Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
(2010-2015) working with researchers in fundamental energy science to utilize
discoveries in new business activities and helped create and obtain external
funding for dozens of startups involving diverse technologies (from
industrial-scale microbiology and DNA diagnostics to thin film oxides and high
performance supercomputers). In 2013, he served on a White House Office of
Science & Technology Policy panel to improve technology transfer of basic
research. Between 1986 and 2007, he was a managing director of venture capital
funds from the U.S., Japan, Taiwan and China (IRR exceeding 65%, generating
returns of over $600,000,000). He has served on the boards of NASDAQ-listed
companies and helped early stage ventures develop business plans and obtain
first round funding. As an entrepreneur, he is currently a co-founder of three
start-ups involving molecular biology detection and treatment of Alzheimer’s
disease, powerful molecular biology techniques enhancing yields of agricultural
crops, and natural microbial fermentation to capture waste biogas for
conversion into biodegradable polymers. He holds an MBA from Stanford
University, an MS Engineering from West Virginia College of Graduate Studies,
and a BS Systems Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Send
an email to shelander@berkeley.edu