SEMESTER: Fall 2019
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 Evening-Weekend MBA Program and may be
taken by graduate students from disciplines outside Haas such as engineering,
science, ERG, CBE, law, policy, and more.
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 prerequisites; 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, consulting, entrepreneurship, and manufacturing.
CLASS FORMAT:
· Lectures (always include class
engagement)
· Class discussions (usually
instructor led)
· Guest speakers (always include
class Q/A and often optional lunches after at the UCB Faculty Club)
· Team presentations (teams
present their work to one another throughout the semester)
· Teamwork in class (instructor
coaching is always available)
· Public symposium (teams present
their findings to 200+ clean tech professionals)
As
a three-unit course at Haas, class members are expected to spend 3 hours in
class and 6 hours outside class on course-related activities. For C2M, this
comprises market research, interviews with subject matter experts, and 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 Because most cleantech information is out of date by the time it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 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,
leading universities, and government programs. 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 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.
2019 C2M PROJECTS: This year, C2M will include the following
projects: Brimstone Energy, Cypris, EnZinc, Noble Thermodynamics, Noon Energy,
PARC, and Takachar. For detailed information on them, see http://ei.haas.berkeley.edu/education/c2m/2019-c2m-projects.html.
FACULTY 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 is 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 LiveOps 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.
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. balexander@berkeley.edu
Bill Shelander joins 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 developing and 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. shelander@berkeley.edu