Saturday, October 18, 2008

10:00 a.m. at Alumni Hall

Clean Commerce: Opportunities and Innovation

Andrea Larson, Associate Professor of Business Administration, Darden Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Virginia

The United States market has opportunities for clean products, from renewable energy to benign materials. Andrea Larson, Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration will discuss trends driving change in business. She will highlight innovative companies working to offer substitute products and technologies as solutions to ecological and environmental health challenges. Larson will examine the significance of this new emerging model of business, one that explicitly considers the broader prosperity and health of human and natural systems.

Watch a video introduction to Andrea Larson's presentation.

Bio

Andrea Larson

Andrea Larson's research, teaching and curriculum development target the interdisciplinary integration of environmental, sustainability, human health, and economic performance issues in graduate management education (a topic often encompassed by the term sustainability). Using an entrepreneurship and innovation lens, she brings together science and business in electives Darden's MBA and executive MBA programs. Her work explores innovative ventures that incorporate ecological and environmental health considerations into product design, operations, and strategy. Over the past ten years she has developed teaching materials on topics such as hybrid cars, fuel cells, building design, renewable energy technologies, bio-materials, and systems thinking about industrial waste streams. Her cases and background notes are available through Darden Publishing. Active in the National Research Council's work on green chemistry, in efforts to join business management education with engineering and chemistry training around sustainability concerns, and in work with the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) through service on the Social and Environmental Impact Network Advisory Board to enhance the quality and availability of research and teaching materials, her priority is advancing cross disciplinary education and informed decision making for current and future business leaders. 

Larson currently serves on the faculty at the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia where she has taught entrepreneurship and strategy courses in the required and elective MBA programs, designed and delivered the first U.S.-based executive program on entrepreneurial innovation and environmental issues, and published on innovation, network alliances, and environment & sustainable development topics in peer-review journals (including Administrative Science Quarterly), books, and business press venues. A forthcoming chapter on sustainability and entrepreneurship will appear in the leading entrepreneurship text book New Venture Creation by Jeffrey Timmons. Larson taught in an Environmental Entrepreneurship at Stanford's Graduate School of Business (Fall, 2007) and has served on the entrepreneurship faculty at the Bainbridge Graduate Institute for five years. BGI is located on Bainbridge Island, Seattle, Washington, and offers an MBA in sustainable business.

Larson received her Ph.D. from Harvard University. She has a joint Doctorate awarded by Harvard Business School and the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.