Where no b-school has gone before: Haas launches course on space, the Arctic, and beyond

A new UC Berkeley Haas MBA class teaches students to understand the challenges and business opportunities of doing business in extreme environments.

Before he arrived at UC Berkeley Haas, Ryan Delaney, EWMBA 28, spent a decade building a startup clean fuel manufacturing facility in Haiti while navigating a deepening political crisis. Before that, he worked in mineral exploration in the Atacama Desert on South America’s Pacific coast—the world’s driest place. So when he spotted a new MBA course named Frontier Ventures: Space, Air, Marine, and Arctic, there was no question whether he’d sign up.

“The idea of working at the frontier isn’t novel to me; it’s my comfort zone,” said Delaney, co-founder and former COO of Carbon Roots International. “This course aligned not just with my past interests, but my future interests in a way that I haven’t seen with any other course yet.”

For Delaney and 24 fellow UC Berkeley Haas Evening & Weekend MBA students, the five-day elective class this month was an exploration of both the new and the unknown. Combining team project work, site visits, and lectures and discussions, the class brought in top leaders, including a former NASA CTO, C-level airline execs, veteran venture investors, government ministers, and experts in geography and global resilience. 

The timing could hardly be better. Students wrapped the course just as SpaceX made history with the largest IPO ever, an event that further shifts how investors, entrepreneurs, and business schools think about the commercial space economy: no longer a moonshot, but a market.

“We’re helping students understand the complexity of environments that are driven by very tough physics and very tough geopolitics,” said Olaf Groth of the Haas Professional Faculty in the Business & Public Policy Group, who teaches the class with Professor Adair Morse. “We’re asking, ‘What’s going to happen with mining in space or in the Arctic?’ As the Arctic ice melts much more speedily than we thought we’ve sadly reached a tipping point. Now we have to make sense of this.”

The class emerged as a collaboration between Groth and Morse, who share a goal to explore extreme environments and the vast opportunities these emerging areas will yield. 

The students explored how new economies and industries will be built through a combination of AI, hardware tech, entrepreneurship, consulting, and government. (The space economy alone is expected to grow to $1.8 trillion by 2035, up from $630 billion in 2023, according to the World Economic Forum and McKinsey & Company.)

Morse, the William A. and Betty H. Hasler Chair in New Enterprise Development, lends deep experience in analyzing and financing complex ventures that involve public and private funding sources, while Groth, founder and CEO of Cambrian Futures and Labs, is a renowned futurist who studies global AI innovation, strategy, and geopolitics.

On day one of the class, Groth dove into discussions about bottlenecks that slow down infrastructure opportunities in air, space, sea, and Arctic domains. Then he asked students to evaluate opportunities using an “Eliminate, Consider, Observe” framework—before introducing a management tool he co-designed called the FLP-IT foresight methodology to project how these areas will evolve. Students then had to go deep on an opportunity and frame a solution. 

Much of the innovation required to do business in these remote emerging spaces require physical AI—systems that interact directly with the physical world through sensors that send instructions to actuators, robotic limbs, or navigation controls. Physical AI requires substantial capital, Morse said.

To strengthen the students’ early-stage finance knowledge, Morse walked students through a crash course in how to to think like a VC: weighing an opportunity, describing its limitations, and finding the right kind of capital to invest.  

Then students heard directly from industry experts including Raj Pai, MBA 98, a venture capital investor and former CTO of NASA Mission Support, and David Blakely, BS 82, (engineering physics), MS 83 (mechanical engineering), a partner at Newline Ventures, during a panel on air and space investing. They were joined on a panel by Frederick Reid, former global head of transportation for Airbnb and founding CEO of Virgin America, now a senior fellow at the Institute for Business Innovation at Haas.

For Jen Cole, EWMBA 27, a marine biologist and COO of Good Machine, a climate-focused venture capital studio, the challenge and expense of working in frontier environments hit close to home. 

Cole, who grew up on Guam, said she worries that the island will be under water within 30 years. After traveling to Greenland several years ago to study the sea level rise in the city of Ilulissat, she realized how capital intensive it is to reach remote areas and build the infrastructure required to gather data. “Through the Frontier Ventures class, we’re looking at the types of data we need to capture in the Arctic and in these other ecosystems and how we can use that data to build a better world,” she said.

A visit to UC Berkeley’s Richmond Field Station

To bring classroom ideas to life, students left Haas for the day, heading to the nearby Richmond Field Station, UC Berkeley’s 175-acre campus that’s used as a living lab for applied research. Students checked out a test track for autonomous vehicles, the station’s drone testing park, and the V2X Lab, used for evaluating connectivity between autonomous vehicles and smart infrastructure and between vehicles and the grid. 

Nita Chandrasekhar, EWMBA 27,  said the visit was a highlight of the week, providing insights into real-world tech and how innovators overcome the barriers of science to launch a business. 

“It’s a brand new experience for me,” she said. “This is a playground where you can test drones, test robotics, and test LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging used in robot technology).”

On Thursday, Groth and Morse held a session on preparing for so-called wildcards like climate disaster, AI disruption, geopolitical conflict, and cyber incidents. Guest speaker Jason Stack, who is launching a maritime startup, highlighted the need for baby steps before introducing any new military technology.

“One of the first things we do are simulations,” said Stack, who is former director of the Naval Office’s AI Task Force. “In the military, we go to stateside labs and work with the women and men who just rotated back to the states from a deployment. They challenge us and challenge the technology, and we go through many iterations before going to a theater overseas.”

Sharing final pitches

To wrap up the week, the students headed to UC Berkeley’s Bakar Labs, where teams shared their final startup concept pitches, explaining the challenge, why current solutions fail, and how their proposed venture creates value. All pitches required a venture capital and exit strategy. 

Tyler MacDowell, EWMBA 27, said he took the course to learn more about the intersection of finance and AI—but walked away with a lot more. “This has been the coolest combination of classes, speakers, and field trips,” he said. “You don’t usually hear about this kind of work and the quality of the class has been phenomenal.”

Delaney, who recently closed his second startup, said he’s hoping to find partners for a new venture at the intersection of the frontier and clean tech in the class. “This course aligned not just with my past interests but my future interests in a way that I haven’t seen with any other course yet,” he said.

The Frontier Ventures course will be offered to Full-time MBA students next year. (A possible site visit or a speaker from the Berkeley Air & Space Center at NASA Research Park in Silicon Valley is planned for the future.)