Climate change has placed all of us and our planet at existential risk. We are in the midst of a multi-decade, multi-trillion dollar economic transition to address current global climate and sustainability challenges. Entrepreneurs must innovate business models, leverage new tools, and explore new resources to meet these social and environmental challenges. This course is designed to prepare students for career success in launching sustainability-focused ventures. Whether founding a startup, launching an investment fund, spearheading sustainability initiatives within a corporation, or starting a non-profit, you will need to develop your ecopreneurial skills. Students will gain unique perspectives delivered by real-world practitioners. The class offers practical knowledge and insights through vignettes – mini case studies – and readings by highlighting key challenges and difficult decisions faced by sustainability leaders and entrepreneurs. This highly interactive course will anchor around debate, discussion, role-played dialogue, and postmortem analysis. The course is particularly well suited for students looking to understand the unique challenges and opportunities in ecopreneurship.
Faculty Principal Investigator (PI) Required?: N/A
- Updated: October 22, 2025
- Entrepreneurship: Primary Entrepreneurship Focus
- Sustainability: Primary Sustainability Focus
- Eligibility: Graduate Students, GSB MBA1 Students, GSB MBA2 Students, GSB MSx Students, GSB Students, Masters Students, PhD Students
- Objective(s): Enrich
- Resource Type: Courses
- Quarter(s) Available: Winter
More Ecopreneurship Resources
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- Courses
This course is designed for students of all backgrounds and provides an introduction to business ownership and an entrepreneurial mindset with a focus on operating businesses with positive social impact as a core principle and/or within diverse communities with an aim to create positive impact for future generations as well as profitability and sustainability models....
- Entrepreneurship: Primary Entrepreneurship Focus
- Sustainability: Primary Sustainability Focus
- Eligibility: Co-term, Graduate Students, GSB MBA1 Students, GSB MBA2 Students, GSB MSx Students, GSB Students, Masters Students, PhD Students, Stanford Students, Undergraduate Students
- Objective(s): Discover, Enrich
- Resource Type: Courses
- Quarter(s) Available: Spring
- Courses
This course is intended for Master's-level students who seek to engage with humanity's great sustainability challenges by creating and scaling a successful organization. The course material deals with both the transformation of existing organizations to succeed by being more sustainable, and with 'ecopreneurship' - the creation of a new organization aimed at successfully advancing environmental sustainability...
- Entrepreneurship: Primary Entrepreneurship Focus
- Sustainability: Primary Sustainability Focus
- Eligibility: Graduate Students, GSB MBA1 Students, GSB MBA2 Students, GSB MSx Students, GSB Students, Masters Students, PhD Students
- Objective(s): Enrich
- Resource Type: Courses
- Quarter(s) Available: Spring
- Courses
As climate induced variability, aging infrastructure, and regulatory pressure stress traditional water networks, utilities and water end users are forced to get creative about how they procure, treat, and deliver water. These stressors are creating new investment opportunities, as well as opportunities for researchers and entrepreneurs to introduce new solutions...
- Entrepreneurship: Primary Entrepreneurship Focus
- Sustainability: Primary Sustainability Focus
- Eligibility: Co-term, Graduate Students, GSB MBA1 Students, GSB MBA2 Students, GSB MSx Students, GSB Students, Masters Students, PhD Students, Stanford Student, Stanford Students, Undergraduate Students
- Objective(s): Discover, Enrich
- Resource Type: Courses
- Quarter(s) Available: Winter