Environmental Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Catalog description

This course will equip students to think critically about the forces that shape innovation and entrepreneurial change, and how they factor into the possible trajectories to a low-carbon future. We will conceptualize ventures such as Tesla, Orsted, and Beyond Meat. Are they mirages, isolated exceptions, or the vanguard of low-carbon enterprises that will outcompete carbon-intensive incumbents? In preparation, we will familiarize ourselves with the conditions that bulwark the status quo - such as economic lock-in, policy inertia, and cultural norms - and the ways innovators contend with them. Are there patterns that this dynamic takes on, some in which new paradigms gain momentum and others in which business-as-usual prevails?