Sustainable Entrepreneurship involves the application of business solutions to societal problems. It entails new
ways of creating, capturing, and delivering sustainable impact in a commercially viable way.
At the core of the course is the process of developing low-cost experiments to learn about the viability of new
processes, products, or services that create, capture, or deliver sustainable impact. There will be multiple
iterations of the idea until an attractive variant is identified or an avenue to an adjacent space is explored. The
course also familiarizes students with how best to present their market validation information and the initial
outlines of their business models or cost-benefit analysis to stakeholders including internal corporate champions
or external early-stage investors in the social impact space.
The course will guide students in the process of developing and validating new ideas to create sustainable impact
either through a new venture or with a company. Students will work in teams, and each team will be assigned to a
mentor who will provide the team with feedback over the course of the project.
By the end of this course, students will be able to:
• Identify customer and beneficiary needs through prototyping
• Develop mock prototypes of their new processes, products or services
• Understand who are “lead users” or “early-evangelist” for the new idea
• Develop networking strategy to reach “lead users” or “early-evangelist” consumers
• Develop simultaneous trials to get feedback from “lead users” or “early-evangelist” consumers
• Understand the drivers of roles and incentives for a new business team
• Understand how to outline a business model for a new idea
• Present their market-validated new business idea to internal champions, investors and industry experts
Students developed entrepreneurial solutions to social/environmental problems that are market-friendly and commercially viable, which include producing mock prototypes of the product or service, to the organisation.