Technology Entrepreneurship and Sustainability

This course is aimed at high-tech entrepreneurs who have great ideas which they like to implement in established organizations, through intrapreneurship or corporate venturing, or use to start and grow themselves new companies. The course is specifically focused on the business opportunities related to new energy technologies. New, emerging, sometimes radically different energy technologies provide significant opportunities for alternative products and services, new business models and new ways of working for more efficient approaches to resource exploitation and energy production and consumption. Yet to harness these opportunities, it often requires to abandon existing paradigms and search in landscapes more distant from current ones. Entrepreneurial activity is a key driver here and the need to develop the skills to develop and act on innovative business opportunities is increasingly vital. By using evidence-based content, methods, and models this course guides you in the analyses of new venture opportunities by assessing and investigating the commercial potential of implementing new technologies either from a social challenge or technology perspective. Opportunity recognition, product-service innovation, sustainable business modelling, and new venture growth dynamics in the context of networks of established firms and the wider stakeholders are core elements of this course.

This course is the third course in the SET Economics en Society profile.

The assessment is composed of several elements:

1. Active participation during the lectures and learning block assignments. You will be assessed based on the active participation, completing assigned readings, and on time assignment submission of each learning blocks. This will account for the 30% of the final grade.

2. Group report and final presentation. Proposed group assignment. This consists of two parts. The first part is about analysing the business model of a start-up, identify how the business model works and reflect on it by the literature and come with suggestion to improve or adapt it to new technological opportunities. Then the second part is to identify an established firm in the energy sector that is related to the field of the start-up and analyse for this established firm what the corporate venturing activities are that they have to support new innovations either through internal venturing or by acquiring external ventures. Then analyse how the start-up could contribute to the large firm in terms of making strategic or operational transitions into new energy systems and vice versa what the benefits are for the start-up to become a venture within the established firm.

Students will present and submit a final report and will be judged on their ability to understand both theoretical and practical aspects of bringing a technology to the market, and to analyse energy-related business challenges and opportunities in the field of entrepreneurship and innovation. The group grade will be adjusted for individual participation. This will account for the 40% of the final grade.

3. Individual: Theory quizzes (30%)

All marks will be expressed on a scale of 1-10.