Environmental Entrepreneurship: Start-up Essentials for Success

Alice Nichols has more than thirty years of experience in partnering with leaders to align and integrate initiatives such as vision creation, innovation in designing pursuits, nonprofit and corporate sustainability, and building ventures in the environmental ecosystem (renewables, energy, water, agriculture, and finance) that are scalable and are self-supporting over time through nonprofit or for-profit channels. She works internationally and domestically in the US and has worked to forge interdependent alliances between and within organizations. She is a certified national instructor for the National Science Foundation I Corps program and works with the Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratories (NREL), working one-on-one with researchers and interns as well as creating content videos for their use. Nichols chaired the mentor committee for Cleantech Open NE, the world's largest clean technology accelerator for funding and fostering start-ups and is one of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's I Corps instructors. She has taught at the Harvard Division of Education for six years and teaches courses for undergraduates as adjunct faculty at the Brown University Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship. While her list of strategy clients over years of consulting is lengthy, of more relevance is her work with start-up ventures over the last decade in the environmental space—working with seasoned professionals who want to pivot their careers using a green lens, researchers who want to commercialize their research in the environmental area, and earlier students who want to enter the sustainability field to focus on environmental justice.