In 2020 over 1,000 educators joined us online to learn and share how to teach during the pandemic. Now we’re heading back into the classroom and the world has changed. What is the “new normal” for Lean Education? Will using video to “get out of the building” still play a role? What roles do diversity, equity and inclusion play in future syllabi?
Join me, our guest speaker Dr. Laura Tyson, our panelists Brandy Nagel, Ivy Shultz, Michael Camp and Jim Hornthal and hosts Jerry Engel, Pete Newell, Steve Weinstein and your peers for a robust discussion to these questions at the 4th edition of Lean Innovation Educators Summit on June 3rd, 1 – 4pm EDT, 10am – 1pm PDT.
Why The Pandemic has changed everything. After a year plus in the virtual teaching environment how much will stick and what will return to pre-pandemic norms? How much of our virtual “getting out of the classroom” teaching methods will remain? The business landscape crippled some industries while others have exploded. Which ones will rebound? The funding environment for our students continues to be on fire. Will that continue? How will the push for diversity, equity and inclusion affect educators?
What The event will begin with a fireside chat with Dr. Laura Tyson former Dean of the Berkeley Haas School of Business and former Chairman of the National Economic Council. The respondent panel will include, Brandy Nagel (Georgia Tech), and Ivy Shultz (Columbia University), Michael Camp (Ohio State), Jim Hornthal (UC Berkeley). To learn from each other and share ideas, we’ll then go into breakout sessions so you can discuss the topics from the fireside chat and share best practices with your peer Lean educators from around the world.
How This session is free to all but limited to Innovation educators. You can register for the event here and/or learn more on our website. We look forward to gathering as a community of educators to shape the future of Lean Innovation Education.
When See you on June 3rd 1pm – 4pm EDT, 10am-1pm PDT.
As Director of the U.S. Army’s Rapid Equipping Force Pete Newell delivered innovation at speed and scale in the Department of Defense. Pete is now CEO of BMNT, a company that delivers innovation solutions and processes for governments.
Here are Pete’s 5 principles that will accelerate innovation.
To help a large Defense organization wrestle with how to increase the velocity of innovation in their ranks Steve Blank and I spent the better part of last week with our heads together reviewing everything we learned in the five years since we merged the concepts of problem curation and Lean while launching the innovation pipeline.
The original Innovation Pipeline sketch – 2016
I spent yesterday sifting through the most recent lessons learned and results from a series of accelerators BMNT is running for the intelligence community. Then last night I watched the final presentations from the inaugural Hacking for National Security course in Australia before jumping over to teach Stanford’s Hacking for Defense® (H4D) class.
Looking back on the week I’m blown away by how far we’ve come since we merged the two methodologies five years ago and by how fast we are discovering the pathways toward solving incredibly hard problems. Some examples:
In less than six weeks a Stanford H4D team has redefined a problem related to security vetting and radicalization while also describing the pathway a solution could follow to deployment within the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community.
A Navy team recently sourced 80 problems, then curated down to one priority problem to solve. In less than 60 days they created 26 MVPs while interviewing over two dozen companies. They then incubated and delivered a solution that will help get large vessels back to sea faster, potentially saving the Navy $20M-$30M a year.
In just three weeks, the DIA MARS team sourced 100 problems from nearly 400 people, then curated and selected five priority problems to focus on. In eight weeks, five teams conducted more than 125 interviews (across 53 stakeholder organizations) and 12 experiments to deliver five validated proofs-of-concept and the evidence needed to confidently invest resources to prototype three of the five based on their user desirability, technical feasibility and organizational viability.
What I observed from the week’s deep dive: Whether it is an agency cross-functional team or a university-based “Hacking for” team we are accelerating, five key concepts drive the foundation for this increasing pace of learning and solution delivery. They are
The power of Lean Methodology is supercharged when discovery begins with a well-curated and prioritized problem. Getting to one well-curated problem requires access to a source of hundreds of them.
Problem curation doesn’t stop until discovery is complete — the process of trying to discover the solution to a problem helps define the actual problem (and for .gov folks the actual requirement for the future solution).
Stakeholder mapping and nailing the value propositions for beneficiaries, buyers, supporters, advocates and potential saboteurs are critical to building a pathway through the phases of the innovation pipeline and transitioning a solution to deployment.
The key to understanding value propositions is in building interviews that are based on a set of hypotheses (about the problem, the stakeholder and potential solutions to be explored) and data to be captured while using minimum viable products (just enough “product” to increase the efficacy of a conversation and increase the speed of learning).
Innovation happens because of people and it takes a village. Whether academic-based like our Hacking for Defense teams or internal organizational Integrated Product or Cross-Functional Teams (IPTs/CFTs), accelerator teams perform best when supported by:
Teachers – who can ground teams in a common framework and language for the discipline of innovation and entrepreneurship.
Coaches – who can walk teams through the practical application of innovation tools in context with the problem they are trying to solve.
Mentors – who will provide relentlessly direct feedback to teams and challenge them on the quality of the hypotheses, MVPs and the analysis of what they’ve learned, while driving them through each pivot rather than letting them get bogged down in “analysis paralysis.”
Advisors – who will provide alternative viewpoints that will enable teams to see clearer pathways through bureaucracies.
Connectors – who will help teams rapidly grow their networks to gain new insights from unique partners not yet discovered.
If your organization is running innovation activities or an accelerator and these five principles aren’t part of their program they are likely wasting your organization’s time and resources, and contributing to Innovation Theater instead of deploying solutions to real problems.
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Next up we’ll dig into how the innovation pipeline serves a parallel process for managing innovation
Enterprise Innovation for the 21st Century
Today’s environment requires separate systems for innovation and execution that operate with parallel and sometimes overlapping processes
The U.S. Department of Defense is coming to grips with the idea that the technologies it needs to keep the country safe and secure are no longer exclusively owned by the military or its prime contractors. AI, machine learning, autonomy, cyber, quantum, access to space, semiconductors, biotech are all being driven by commercial companies. At the front-end of these innovations are startups – organizations the Department of Defense hasn’t previously dealt with at scale.
They’re now learning how.
Mrinal Menon is one of my Hacking for Defense students at Stanford where he’s currently in the MBA program. He’s a former U.S. Navy Surface Warfare Officer. Jeff Decker is a co-instructor of the Hacking for Defense class and the Stanford program director. Jeff is an Army Second Ranger Battalion veteran.
Mrinal and Jeff’s article below explains how startups can adapt and thrive while working with the Defense Department. And how the Department of Defense is learning to work with startups.
At a time when young companies struggle to find technology sectors not dominated by Silicon Valley’s giants, most startups remain oblivious to one of the largest markets in the world, the U.S. Defense Department. The military awarded $445 billion in contracts in 2020. By comparison, last year’s global market for software-as-a-service, one of the hottest sectors for startup creation and investment, was estimated at $104 billion.
There’s a willing market here, too. The Pentagon is eager for help from the nation’s innovators. The military is clamoring for cutting-edge technologies in areas like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and autonomy. To attract interest the Defense Department is handing out unprecedented numbers of small contracts and in 2020 seeded 1,635 firms with more than $1.5 billion in early funding. Dozens of outreach programs across the military now offer quick revenue to early-stage companies. A startup could land a contract worth up to $3 million within months of entering the defense market.
This emerging opportunity reflects the urgency of keeping pace with rivals like China and Russia, who are furiously integratingcommercial technologies like AI, quantum computing, and unmanned systems into their armed forces. If former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s prediction about China overtaking the United States in AI comes to pass, the People’s Liberation Army could be better prepared than the U.S. military for future conflicts in which cyberattacks and drone swarms play a larger role than warships and fighter jets. Without adopting cutting-edge commercial technologies, the U.S. military may be rendered obsolete.
Yet, for every newly minted success like Palantir or Anduril, thousands of companies struggle to find follow-on opportunities after receiving early innovation contracts. Historically, more than 80% of new entrants exit the defense market before they have a chance to see recurring revenue. Anduril founder Palmer Luckey has sardonically noted that the only defense companies to reach unicorn status in the past 30 years have all been founded by billionaires able to endure long gaps in funding. To truly compete with technologically advanced rivals, the Defense Department will ultimately need to enable a broad pool of innovative founders to succeed. Until this ecosystem materializes, however, building a successful defense business is likely to take years of grueling effort. Before committing to work with the military, startups must look past the allure of early money and carefully assess whether the defense market is right for them.
The Key Questions For Startup Despite the Pentagon’s newfound enthusiasm for innovation, startups in the defense market continue to encounter longstanding obstacles. Most companies face uncertainty when trying to bridge prototyping awards with more permanent follow-on contracts. Startups that successfully fulfill innovation contracts don’t automatically scale. Instead, their solutions must still compete for funding in a formal budgeting and acquisition process before being eligible for widespread adoption . This ordeal takes two years or more, during which startups should anticipate little or no revenue as they try to push their product through the bureaucracy.
While earning the first $1 million in the defense market can be relatively easy, landing the next $10 million is extremely difficult. Before committing to work with the military, startups should carefully consider whether the defense market is right for them by asking three questions.
Is the company prepared to endure revenue gaps? As noted, companies may go years without defense revenue while trying to bridge early contracts with larger opportunities. During this period, startups will need to sustain business development activities and may incur additional regulatory and compliance costs to ensure their product is usable by the military. Investors are also likely to express impatience with the long timelines of defense sales. The best prepared companies can either raise sufficient funds to keep operating or count on revenue from other sources. Palmer Luckey’s Anduril has aggressively pursued financingto sustain growth. Recently public enterprise-AI firm C3.ai entered the defense market having already built a successful commercial business in the energy vertical. Similarly, 3D-printing homebuilder Icon’s technologies have applications that extend well beyond national security use cases to commercial housing markets.
Can I balance the needs of my defense and commercial customers? The best-positioned startups solve fundamentally similar problems for both military and commercial users. Satellite imagery firm Orbital Insight’s Go platform, for example, automates imagery analysis for defense analysts, investors, and agribusiness alike. Some amount of customization is inevitable given that military users often have specific mission requirements or technical constraints. However, companies that can serve military customers without fundamentally altering their existing product roadmap are likely to be most successful.
Incidents like Google’s withdrawal from Project Maven have highlighted the potential for conflict when commercial companies decide to work with the military. This tension tends to be lower at startups where an early team willingly signs on to pursue defense business. Regardless, companies should be mindful of the reputational impacts working with the DoD could have on their existing business.
The Case for Optimism Companies eyeing the defense market have reason to be optimistic. There are a growing number of efforts to remove obstacles to partnerships between high-tech startups and the military. For example, the Air Force last year created the Strategic Financing (STRATFI) program. STRATFI provides the Air Force’s most promising commercial innovators, a list which includes Icon and Orbital Insight, quick access to large contracts worth up to $15M. Another positive sign is President Biden’s nomination of former Symantec CEO Mike Brown to oversee the Pentagon’s purchases of new technologies. As director of the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), Brown has spearheaded investments in commercial technologies and helped C3.ai, Joby Aviation, and other Silicon Valley standouts navigate funding gaps. If confirmed, Brown could accelerate much needed reforms to military acquisition processes.
A startup that makes it through the hurdles may find a massive market with a stable set of customers eager for better technology solutions. The U.S. government pays its bills on time, defense budgets are shielded from short-term volatility, and contracts may be guaranteed for multiple years. Once onboarded, military users can quickly become long-term customers given the challenges involved with switching to another product.
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