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Entrepreneurship + Ocean/Coastal Conservation Course
In Spring 2020, UC Santa Cruz offered the first class of its kind focused on identifying solutions to key coastal and ocean problems using Lean Design
In Fall 2026, enrollment is open to students across UCSC
Please complete the interest form if you would like to join the Fall 2026 course.
Learn Lean Launchpad and other Lean Design techniques for startup success and solve real problems.
Tackle complex problems critical to saving our oceans and coasts with an interdisciplinary team of students from across campus.
Open to graduate and undergraduate students from any school, department, or program at UCSC.
Limited enrollment by permission of instructor team.
Interested in the course? Want to learn more?
Interested in the course? Want to learn more?
Email Hacking4Oceans@ucsc.edu
For more details, watch the short intro to the course below or review the slides
How do I enroll in the course?
UCSC graduate and undergraduate students: Permission numbers will be issued based on completed interest forms.
Undergraduates Register for ENVS 155
Grad Students Register for CSP 281A
Questions?: Email csp@ucsc.edu
Sign up for Office Hours with this LINK
Across the country, startups are using the principles of Lean design to create the next generation of solutions. Startups operate with continual speed and urgency 24/7. Over the last few years they've learned how to be not only fast, but extremely efficient with resources and time using lean startup methodologies. The Lean Startup methods have been adopted to take on actual problems that are curated and presented either to students taking a class or made broadly available in open challenges to the community.
In this course, you will use Lean Startup methods and approaches to solve actual problems facing ocean focused organizations (government, for-profit, and non-profit).
Hacking 4 Oceans takes on problems facing the ocean. Some problems might use Lean to solve internal process problems (e.g. cut the time it takes to process permit approaches to advance adaptation) to large scale problems that have applicability in other regions (e.g. novel solutions to create sustainable aquaculture feed). Students will form teams and choose one problem to work on for the quarter from a set of available problems. Each team works on a different problem.
Read stories about the course here.
General
General
Course Title: Hacking 4 Oceans: Solving Ocean Issues with Lean Launchpad
Course #s: CSP 281A, 5 units
Syllabus:
Enrollees must complete the interest form.
Term: 2026 Course offered Fall Quarter on Mondays 3-6pm in Interdisciplinary Sciences Building (ISB) 431
Teaching & Planning Team: Anne R. Kapuscinski, Radhika Malpani, and Sarah Eminhizer (additional advising from Steve Weinstein)
Email questions to the Teaching Team: Hacking4Oceans@ucsc.edu
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