New Spring Courses: Clean Tech, Chinese Business Culture, and Sports Business

Commercializing emerging clean-energy technology and taking an insider's look at the sports business with a seasoned Major League Baseball executive are among the opportunities offered to Haas students in new spring electives.

MBA Courses

In Cleantech to Market (MBA 290T.5), full-time MBA students will develop go-to-market plans for inventions coming out of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Joint BioEnergy Institute, and the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS).

Students will conduct thorough market research, work together as an enterprise, and make pitches to companies and investors. Acceptance in the course — cross-listed with the College of Engineering — required a competitive process.

"We are really excited because the class brings together so many different types of students — from engineering, the sciences, public health, and law — to help commercialize technologies from world-renowned labs," says Beverly Alexander, who is teaching the course with Cyrus Wadia, her fellow co-director of the Cleantech to Market Program, housed in the new Energy Institute at Haas. “Berkeley is unique in having multiple top-10 graduate programs sitting right next to clean technology centers, and our curriculum leverages that proximity."

The course expands on the Cleantech to Market Program launched last year.

Another unique energy sector course offered to full-time as well as evening and weekend MBA students is Financing Energy and Infrastructure Projects (EW/MBA237.11), which will meet for two full Sundays. Instructor Allan Marks, a global finance partner with international law firm Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, will give students a thorough overview of commercial, legal, economic, and policy issues.

In The Business of Sports (MBA296.3 T) – another of the half dozen new MBA courses – former San Diego Padres CEO Sandy Alderson will bring in a range of guest speakers to cover myriad aspects of the $200 billion US sports industry, from financing and merchandizing to labor relations and broadcasting. Alderson, who taught the undergraduate Sports Marketing class for the first time in the fall, also previously served as president of the Oakland Athletics and spent time in the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball.

Evening and weekend MBA students will expand their cultural competency in International Business: Doing Business in China (EWMBA 277-11), which begins less than a week after Google threatened to exit the Chinese market. Instructor Anthony Zaloom, a corporate lawyer with 30 years of experience in Asia, will use well-known deals, hypotheticals, and his own experience to analyze the challenges to dealmaking in the People's Republic — including negotiating styles, threats to intellectual property, and endemic corruption.

Undergraduate Courses

Undergraduates can choose from six new special topics classes this spring semester, including Energy Market Strategies and Policies (UGBA117), taught by Assistant Professor Lucas Davis, and Sustainability: Business Measures for Success (UGBA 196), taught by Tony Kingsbury, director of the school's Sustainable Products and Solutions Program and an executive-on-loan from the Dow Chemical Company. Kingsbury will teach students about a triple bottom-line approach to sustainability by looking at social, environmental, and economic measures.

Other new undergraduate courses focus on complex transactions, leadership, philanthropy and international consulting.

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