SEMESTER: Fall 2018

COURSE NUMBER: MBA 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 cross-listed with the EWMBA 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

PREREQUISITE(S): No firm prerequisites; however, Energy & Environmental Markets is helpful.

CAREER FIELD:  The many industries that comprise cleantech, including energy, environment, green chemistry and water.  Also skills that cross industries, such as finance, product development, project management, and manufacturing. 

CLASS FORMAT:
17.2% Class discussions (which generally include an instructor-led portion, except for those comprising team presentations to one another)
13.8% Guest speakers (which always include a substantive Q&A portion with the class)
6.9%  Lectures (even these include some class engagement)
3.4%  Public symposium (the teams’ final presentations the week after Thanksgiving)
58.6% 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 specific 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 Because most cleantech information is out of date by the time it is published, many of our readings are from the Internet.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 100+ 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, leading universities, and government programs. Now in its 10th year, C2M has served over 200 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 technology 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:

Team
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 start ups 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