Fostering Sustainable Energy Entrepreneurship among Students: The Business Oriented Technological System Analysis (BOTSA) Program at Eindhoven University of Technology

The Business Oriented Technological System Analysis (BOTSA) program is a new teaching and learning concept developed by Eindhoven University of Technology (the Netherlands) with participation from innovative companies in renewable energy. It is designed to stimulate sustainable entrepreneurship among engineering students in this field. The program combines the placement of students in companies to study and contribute to the development and incubation of sustainable energy innovations, with a curriculum at the university designed to support these internships from a scientific perspective. The teaching method assists students in developing a broad system view that enables them to analyze the potential of, and bottlenecks to promising innovations from a realistic business perspective. This empowers students to identify those techno-economic aspects that are critical to innovation success, and advise the entrepreneurs about these aspects. Experience indicates that teachers, students, and entrepreneurs find BOTSA a valuable way of coaching, learning and working. Theoretical support for this method is found in system analysis originating in OPEN ACCESS Sustainability 2015, 7 8206 evolutionary innovation theory in combination with concepts of entrepreneurship, business model generation and sustainable/green innovation.