The 6th Lean Innovation Educators Summit – Education and Innovation in the Age of Chaos and Disruption

Join Jerry Engel, Pete Newell, and Steve Weinstein for the sixth edition of the Lean Innovation Educators Summit December 14, 1-4 pm Eastern Time, 10 am-1 pm Pacific Time. Register here. — This virtual gathering will bring together entrepreneurship educators from around the world who are putting Lean Innovation to work in their classrooms, accelerators, […]

Technology, Innovation, and Great Power Competition – Class 3 – Russia

This article first appeared in West Point’s Modern War Institute.  We just had our third week of our new national security class at Stanford – Technology, Innovation and Great Power Competition. Joe Felter, Raj Shah and I designed the class to cover how technology will shape all the elements of national power (our influence and footprint on the world stage). In class […]

Hacking for Allies

During the Cold War U.S. diplomatic and military alliances existed to defend freedom around the world. Today, these alliances are being reshaped to respond to Russian threats to the Baltics and Eastern Europe and to China’s economic, military, and technological influence worldwide. Hacking for Allies The U.S. Department of Defense works with our allies to […]

How to Find a Market? Use Jobs-To-Be-Done as the Front End of Customer Discovery

Modern entrepreneurship began at the turn of the 21st century with the observation that startups aren’t smaller versions of large companies – large companies at their core execute known business models, while startups search for scalable business models. Lean Methodology consists of three tools designed for entrepreneurs building new ventures: The Business Model Canvas – to write down all […]

A Quick Course on Lean

Over the weekend I got asked the best way to teach students the principles of Lean via Zoom. One of the key lessons from our Educators Conference is that when teaching online complex information needs to be delivered to students in small, easily processed parts. I realized that pre-pandemic I had put together a series […]

You Don’t Need Permission

I was pleasantly surprised to hear from Suresh, an ex-student I’ve known for a long time. A U.S. citizen he was now the head of sales and marketing for a company in London selling medical devices to hospitals in the UK National Health Service.  His boss had identified the U.S. as their next market and […]

Technology, Innovation, and Great Power Competition – Class 1

This article first appeared in West Point’s Modern War Institute. We just had our first week of our new national security class at Stanford – Technology, Innovation and Great Power Competition. Joe Felter, Raj Shah and I designed the class to cover how technology will shape all the elements of national power (our influence and footprint on the world stage). National power […]

Be Where Your Business Is

This post previously appeared on the readwrite blog.   A CEO running a B-to-B startup in needs to live in the city where their business is – or else they’ll never scale. I was having breakfast with Erin, an ex-student, just off a red-eye flight from New York. She’s built a 65-person startup selling enterprise […]

Seven Steps to Small Business Recovery

What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. Friedrich Nietzsche The world is a different place than it was 90 days ago. Countries traded saving lives by shutting down most of their economy. Tens of millions who had jobs are now unemployed worrying about their future. Business owners large and small are struggling to find their […]

Here’s What Happened When Deputy Secretary of Defense Dr. Kathleen Hicks visited Stanford’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation

It was an honor to host US Deputy Secretary of Defense Dr. Kathleen Hicks at Stanford’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation.  (Think of the Deputy Secretary of Defense as the Chief Operating Officer of a company – but in this case the company has 3 million employees (~1.4 million active duty, 750,000 civilians, […]

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