Regenerative Sustainable Venture Development 5 credits

The course includes theoretical concepts and implications of regenerative and sustainable venture development. New venture development addresses social, ecological, and economic challenges across borders that can be met with purpose and innovation. Regenerative sustainable ventures aim to improve the well-being of populations in disadvantaged situations by including them in the venture business model and empowering them to generate societal change and nature restoration. The course gives particular emphasis to entrepreneurial action, including opportunity development, strategic collaborations, frugal innovations, and resource development during start-up, including critical decisions and experiences of sustainable and regenerative entrepreneurs and ways to connect with nature. The content reflects the various aspects relevant to venture development, including: - challenges of social and ecological sustainability across borders, including exclusion, lack of services, diseases, environmental degradation, poverty, - key concepts and models for ventures like the doughnut economy, safe and just planetary boundaries, earth systems science, and the circular economy, - difference between inclusive ventures, sustainable ventures, social ventures, and green ventures, - frugal innovations addressing different considerations to sustainability; - design thinking for regenerative and sustainable, including lean canvas, business model innovation, and prototyping, - ethical aspects of the venture, - collecting, expressing, and analyzing material for building the sustainable and/or regenerative venture across borders, - presenting the results, and - relating frameworks to venture development. **Connection to Research and Practice** The course regenerative sustainable venture development presents sustainable and regenerative entrepreneurship literature. It relies on the design thinking approach and tools. The course is closely related to JIBS core research focus on entrepreneurship and is delivered by JIBS faculty who are at the research frontier of entrepreneurship with interests in sustainability and regeneration. The students taking the course gain understanding of the importance of identifying the root causes of social and ecological problems and learn to use design thinking tools when developing solutions to the identified problems. The practical relevance of this course lies in the acquisition of problematization and prototyping skills.