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The next session of "How to Create a Climate Venture" will run once weekly from February to April 2025. We will meet virtually on Fridays from 1-2pm ET.
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"How to Create a Climate Venture" is open to Harvard students, alumni, faculty, and staff.
The class is also open to affiliates of the following universities: Stanford, MIT, Dartmouth, schools in the ClimateCAP network, and schools in the Greentown Labs TEX-E Consortium (Rice, Texas A&M, UT-Austin, Prairie View A&M, and University of Houston). Not from an eligible university? You can petition for admission.
Participants who work full-time are welcome to enroll if you can commit to attending sessions regularly.
“How to Create a Climate Venture” is designed for aspiring climate entrepreneurs who do not yet have an idea. We will provide structured activities to help you understand the climate venture space and come up with ideas you might want to work on, as well as meet others who are interested in starting climate ventures.
If you have an early-stage idea, and are just getting started on building it out or forming a team, you are welcome to register. If you are pivoting your idea and want to zoom out, you are welcome to register if you think broader ideation and startup tools will help you. Venture ideas may be for-profit or nonprofit or housed within larger institutions.
If your venture already has traction, this is likely not for you.
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The first half of the class is focused on structured ideation, and the second half on idea evaluation.
Ideation sessions cover both mitigation and adaptation and use classic ideation frameworks to generate solutions to climate challenges. Climate entrepreneurs tackling both emissions and city-level adaptation share their journeys. Participants use these examples as well as structured exercises to formulate their own elevator pitches.
The second half of the training hones in on idea evaluation, with sessions focused on the five core areas to validate before diving into a startup. Sessions equip participants with tactical tools in demand validation, A/B waitlist testing, assessing climate impact, and ends with using ChatGPT as a co-ideation tool.
The instructor is Rebekah Emanuel, senior advisor for social impact and director of the Harvard Climate Entrepreneurs Circle at the Harvard Innovation Labs.
The class also features entrepreneurs, operators, funders, and other speakers from the climate entrepreneurship ecosystem, including: Erik Snyder, Sanjay Seth, Ben Soltoff, Margaret Wang, and David Jaffe.
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Rebekah Emanuel is the Senior Advisor for Social Entrepreneurship and Climate at Harvard University. She brings over 15+ years of experience in the social entrepreneurship and climate spaces. Rebekah is the Chair of Harvard's Climate Entrepreneurs Circle, teaches “How to Create a Climate Venture” which is offered to 42 universities, and has also hosted Harvard Business School's podcast on climate, Climate Rising. She has brought multiple start-ups from a few team-members to several hundred and from little revenue to multiple millions. Rebekah is a graduate of Yale and Harvard Business School, and holds an MBA and an LLM.
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Registration is simple — fill out this quick form.
