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Build and pitch a venture in this 2-week entrepreneurship program for high school students at UC Berkeley.
Seats are limited, and this course may sell out for summer 2027. Enroll early to save your seat.
Course Description
A strong business idea starts with a problem worth solving. Find the need, then make a case for the venture you want to build.
In this course you will look for unmet needs and develop an original venture. Use a Lean Business Model Canvas to map how customers, costs, and revenue connect. Market research helps define the customer, demand, and buying patterns. Competitive analysis and an evaluation of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats test what makes your idea different.
Branding and marketing workshops turn that strategy into a message customers understand. Work through fixed and variable costs, pricing, revenue models, and break-even calculations to see what the business would need financially.
Build a professional pitch deck from your research and decisions. Practice answering questions, use peer and instructor feedback, and revise before the Fast Pitch Challenge, evaluated by a panel of judges on the final day. Alongside financial choices, consider how the venture could affect customers and communities.
This two-week full-day academy is part of Summer Discovery at UC Berkeley, held on the university’s campus. Students spend the full program focused on one intensive academy. The academy is available to residential and commuter students.
What You Will Do
• Identify an unmet need and shape it into an original business concept
• Organize the venture using a Lean Business Model Canvas
• Conduct market research and define a target customer
• Analyze competitors, review strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats and refine a value proposition
• Calculate costs, pricing, revenue and a basic break-even point
• Build a pitch deck and present the venture in a Fast Pitch Challenge
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the course, students will be able to:
• Evaluate a real-world problem as a possible business opportunity
• Apply market, competition and financial evidence to a Lean Business Model Canvas
• Present and defend an original venture through a structured business pitch
You’ll leave with your market research, completed business-planning canvas, professional pitch deck, and a certificate of completion.
Why Entrepreneurship Skills Matter
Entrepreneurship teaches students to look closely at problems and ask what would make a solution useful, realistic and different. Customer research builds listening and evidence-gathering skills. A Lean Canvas requires students to organize connected decisions about need, solution, market, cost and revenue.
Developing a pitch also strengthens communication. Students must decide which evidence matters, explain their thinking clearly and respond to questions without losing the central idea. Those habits support school projects, leadership roles and future exploration across business, design, technology and social impact.
Who Should Attend?
For students who have completed 9th, 10th, 11th, or 12th grade.
If you enjoy coming up with ideas and want to find out whether one could become a business, this academy gives you a way to test it. Research, customer interviews or study, and basic calculations help you make stronger choices. You’ll collaborate, revise your thinking, and present to an audience. No finished business idea is required at the start; the work takes you from finding a problem to pitching a venture.
Recommended Program
Based on students surveyed in Summer Discovery’s 2026 UC Berkeley program.
Your Summer at UC Berkeley
UC Berkeley gives high-school students the opportunity to pursue serious academic exploration in a campus environment shaped by scientific inquiry, new ideas, and an active connection to the wider Bay Area. The Berkeley Hills, distinctive architecture, and green spaces make the experience feel different from an ordinary school routine.
Students learn alongside peers, become more independent, and experience the pace and possibility of university life. The Bay Area context adds exposure to a region influenced by research, technology, entrepreneurship, culture, and public debate. For families, the value is not campus prestige alone. It is the combination of academic depth, community, and a student gaining clearer insight into the subjects, environments, and possible directions that genuinely motivate them.
After successfully finishing this course, you will be awarded a certification completion for your accomplishment.
*This is a preview, not what you will receive