ENV 958 (Tentative) () (Tentative) / 2024-2025

Sustainable Business Capstone Consulting Clinic- Entrepreneurs

Credits: 3

The intended outcome of this course is to provide you with a ‘capstone’ experience; consulting to an organization in its early formative years, confronting real-life challenges at the intersections of starting-up, business strategy, and environmental sustainability; all with regular contact with a Founding entrepreneurial team that could be contemporaries or just graduated a few years ahead of you.
The course is designed for you to apply tools and insights gained in this and other courses to a defined project, creating deliverables that will be useful to the entrepreneurs leading their organization. It is designed to help prepare anyone who wishes to become a consultant after graduation; though it is also intended to be useful for those that intend to engage with consultants in their careers post-Yale and may be considering becoming an entrepreneur themselves. In short, there is hopefully something in it for many of you!
 
The brief from the client will be topical and relevant to challenges and opportunities at their organization’s life-stage. It is highly likely to surface potential trade-offs whereby the organization has ambitious plans but lacking the necessary resources to carry them all out. It may also address cross-cutting critical issues of justice, equity, diversity and inclusion; all complicated by living through, and hopefully emerging from, the pandemic. As the clients will be smaller and younger than those in the Fall term of SBCCC, the Founders will be on hand with their team to provide guidance throughout the term. From the Yale side, the Lecturer and Teaching Fellows bring consulting experience and time to help the teams throughout the project.
 
Through a combination of individual work, group work and lively discussion (with clients and classmates), you will establish an understanding of the client’s wider Purpose and Priorities; then help co-define and connect the Potential success of the project with the organization’s broader goals. You will work together in small consulting teams, holding each other accountable to Perform, creating defined deliverables for the client. In this way the course builds off some of the core elements of the Perspectives Course (ENV553 - Fall 2020) and the more structured classes of the course mirror Sustainable Business Capstone Consulting Clinic (ENV953 – Fall 2020)
 
For those students that want a full and immersive picture of the consulting experience, this course is designed to be a complement to:

• Sustainable Business Capstone Consulting Clinic: (Fall), this course matches student consulting teams with sustainability teams and other senior executives of large established organizations (Syllabus here: https://bit.ly/BoydSBCCC)
• Climate Solutions Capstone: Nature-Based Solutions Clinic (Fall) and Climate Solutions Capstone: Sub-National Actors Clinic (Spring): These capstone experiences will focus on projects with clients drawn from local municipalities, local and state NGOs and clients within the Yale community.