No Science, No Startups: The Innovation Engine We’re Switching Off

Posted on October 13, 2025 by steve blank

Tons of words have been written about the Trump Administrations war on Science in Universities. But few people have asked what, exactly, is science? How does it work? Who are the scientists? What do they do? And more importantly, why should anyone (outside of universities) care?

(Unfortunately, you won’t see answers to these questions in the general press – it’s not clickbait enough. Nor will you read about it in the science journals– it’s not technical enough. You won’t hear a succinct description from any of the universities under fire, either – they’ve long lost the ability to connect the value of their work to the day-to-day life of the general public.)

In this post I’m going to describe how science works, how science and engineering have worked together to build innovative startups and companies in the U.S.—and why you should care.

(In a previous post I described how the U.S. built a science and technology ecosystem and why investment in science is directly correlated with a country’s national power. I suggest you read it first.)

How Science Works
I was older than I care to admit when I finally understood the difference between a scientist, an engineer, an entrepreneur and a venture capitalist; and the role that each played in the creation of advancements that made our economy thrive, our defense strong and America great.

Scientists
Scientists (sometimes called researchers) are the people who ask lots of questions about why and how things work. They don’t know the answers. Scientists are driven by curiosity, willing to make educated guesses (the fancy word is hypotheses) and run experiments to test their guesses. Most of the time their hypotheses are wrong. But every time they’re right they move the human race forward. We get new medicines, cures for diseases, new consumer goods, better and cheaper foods, etc.

Scientists tend to specialize in one area – biology, medical research, physics, agriculture, computer science, materials, math, etc. — although a few move between areas. The U.S. government has supported scientific research at scale (read billions of $s) since 1940.

Scientists tend to fall into two categories: Theorists and Experimentalists.

Theorists
Theorists develop mathematical models, abstract frameworks, and hypotheses for how the universe works. They don’t run experiments themselves—instead, they propose new ideas or principles, explain existing experimental results, predict phenomena that haven’t been observed yet. Theorists help define what reality might be.

Theorists can be found in different fields of science. For example:

Physics                    Quantum field theory, string theory, quantum mechanics
Biology                     Neuroscience and cognition, Systems Biology, gene regulation
Chemistry                Molecular dynamics, Quantum chemistry
Computer Science   Design algorithms, prove limits of computation
Economics               Build models of markets or decision-making
Mathematics            Causal inference, Bayesian networks, Deep Learning

The best-known 20th-century theorist was Albert Einstein. His tools were a chalkboard and his brain. in 1905 he wrote an equation E=MC2 which told the world that a small amount of mass can be converted into a tremendous amount of energy. When he wrote it down, it was just theory. Other theorists in the 1930s and ’40s took Einstein’s theory and provided the impetus for building the atomic bomb. (Leo Szilard conceived neutron chain reaction idea, Hans Bethe led the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos, Edward Teller developed hydrogen bomb theory.) Einstein’s theory was demonstrably proved correct over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Experimentalists
In addition to theorists, other scientists – called experimentalists – design and run experiments in a lab. The pictures you see of scientists in lab coats in front of microscopes, test tubes, particle accelerators or NASA spacecraft are likely experimentalists. They test hypotheses by developing and performing experiments. An example of this would be NASA’s James Webb telescope or the LIGO Gravitational-Wave Observatory experiment. (As we’ll see later, often it’s engineers who build the devices the experimentalists use.)

Some of these experimentalists focus on Basic Science, working to get knowledge for its own sake and understand fundamental principles of nature with no immediate practical use in mind.

Other experimentalists work in Applied Science, which uses the findings and theories derived from Basic Science to design, innovate, and improve products and processes.

Applied scientists solve practical problems oriented toward real-world applications. (Scientists at Los Alamos weretrying to understand the critical mass of U-235 (the minimum amount that would explode.) Basic science lays the groundwork for breakthroughs in applied science. For instance: Quantum mechanics (basic science) led to semiconductors which led to computers (applied science). Germ theory (basic science) led to antibiotics and vaccines (applied science). In the 20th century Applied scientists did not start the companies that make end products. Engineers and entrepreneurs did this. (In the 21st century more Applied Scientists, particularly in life sciences, have also spun out companies from their labs.)

Scientists


Where is Science in the U.S. Done?
America’s unique insight that has allowed it to dominate Science and invention, is that after WWII we gave Research and Development money to universities, rather than only funding government laboratories. No other country did this at scale.

Corporate Research Centers
In the 20th century, U.S. companies put their excess profits into corporate research labs. Basic research in the U.S. was done in at Dupont, Bell Labs, IBM, AT&T, Xerox, Kodak, GE, et al.

This changed in 1982, when the Securities and Exchange Commission ruled that it was legal for companies to buy their own stock (reducing the number of shares available to the public and inflating their stock price.) Very quickly Basic Science in corporate research all but disappeared. Companies focused on Applied Research to maximize shareholder value. In its place, Theory and Basic research is now done in research universities.

Research Universities
From the outside (or if you’re an undergraduate) universities look like a place where students take classes and get a degree. However, in a research university there is something equally important going on. Science faculty in these schools not only teach, but they are expected to produce new knowledge—through experiments, publications, patents, or creative work. Professors get grants and contracts from federal agencies (e.g., NSF, NIH, DoD), foundations, and industry. And the university builds Labs, centers, libraries, and advanced computing facilities that support these activities.

In the U.S. there are 542 research universities, ranked by the Carnegie Classification into three categories.

R1: 187 Universities – Very High Research Activity
Conduct extensive research and award many doctoral degrees.
Examples: Stanford, UC Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Michigan, Texas A&M …

R2: 139 Universities – High Research Activity
Substantial but smaller research scale.
Examples: James Madison, Wake Forest, Hunter College, …

R3: 216 Research Colleges/Universities
Limited research focus; more teaching-oriented doctoral programs.
Smaller state universities

Why Universities Matter to Science
U.S. universities perform about 50% of all basic science research (physics, chemistry, biology, social sciences, etc.) because they are training grounds for graduate students and postdocs. Universities spend ~$109 billion a year on research. ~$60 billion of that $109 billion comes from the National Institutes for Health (NIH) for biomedical research, National Science Foundation (NSF) for basic science, Department of War (DoW), Department of Energy (DOE), for energy/physics/nuclear, DARPA, NASA. (Companies tend to invest in applied research and development, that leads directly to saleable products.)

Professors (especially in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) run labs that function like mini startups. They ask research questions, then hire grad students, postdocs, and staff and write grant proposals to fund their work, often spending 30–50% of their time writing and managing grants. When they get a grant the lead researcher (typically a faculty member/head of the lab) is called the Principal Investigator (PI).

The Labs are both workplaces and classrooms. Graduate students and Postdocs do the day-to-day science work as part of their training (often for a Ph.D.). Postdocs are full-time researchers gaining further specialization. Undergraduates may also assist in research, especially at top-tier schools.

(Up until 2025, U.S. science was deeply international with ~40–50% of U.S. basic research done by foreign-born researchers (graduate students, postdocs, and faculty). Immigration and student visas were a critical part of American research capacity.)

The results of this research are shared with the agencies that funded it, published in journals, presented at conferences and often patented or spun off into startups via technology transfer offices. A lot of commercial tech—from Google search to CRISPR—started in university labs.

Universities support their science researchers with basic administrative staff (for compliance, purchasing, and safety) but uniquely in the U.S., by providing the best research facilities (labs, cleanrooms, telescopes), and core scientific services: DNA sequencing centers, electron microscopes, access to cloud, data analysis hubs, etc. These were the best in the world – until the sweeping cuts in 2025.

Engineers Build on the Work of Scientists
Engineers design and build things on top of the discoveries of scientists. For example, seven years after scientists split the atom, it took 10s of thousands of engineers to build an atomic bomb. From the outset, the engineers knew what they wanted to build because of the basic and applied scientific research that came before them.

Scientists Versus Engineers

Engineers create plans, use software to test their designs, then… cut sheet metal, build rocket engines, construct buildings and bridges, design chips, build equipment for experimentalists, design cars, etc.

As an example, at Nvidia their GPU chips are built in a chip factory (TSMC) using the Applied science done by companies like Applied Materials which in turn is based on Basic science of semiconductor researchers. And the massive data centers OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, et al that use Nvidia chips are being built by mechanical and other types of engineers.

My favorite example is that the reusable SpaceX rocket landings are made possible by the Applied Science research on Convex Optimization frameworks and algorithms by Steven Boyd of Stanford. And Boyd’s work was based on the Basic science mathematical field of convex analysis (SpaceX, NASA, JPL, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab all use variations of Convex Optimization for guidance, control, and landing.)

Startup Entrepreneurs Build Iteratively and Incrementally
Entrepreneurs build companies to bring new products to market. They hire engineers to build, test and refine products.

Engineers and entrepreneurs operate with very different mindsets, goals, and tolerances for risk and failure. (Many great entrepreneurs start as engineers e.g., Musk, Gates, Page/Brin). An engineer’s goal is to design and deliver a solution to a known problem with a given set of specifications.

In contrast, entrepreneurs start with a series of unknowns about who are the customers, what are the wanted product features, pricing, etc. They retire each of these risks by building an iterative series of minimum viable products to find product/market fit and customer adoption. They pivot their solution as needed when they discover their initial assumptions are incorrect. (Treating each business unknown as a hypothesis is the entrepreneurs’ version of the Scientific Method.)

Venture Capitalists Fund Entrepreneurs
Venture capitalists (VCs) are the people who fund entrepreneurs who work with engineers who build things that applied scientists have proven from basic researchers.

Unlike banks which will give out loans for projects that have known specifications and outcomes, VCs invest in a portfolio of much riskier investments. While banks make money on the interest they charge on each loan, VCs take part ownership (equity) in the companies they invest in. While most VC investments fail, the ones that succeed make up for that.

Most VCs are not scientists. Few are engineers, some have been entrepreneurs. The best VCs understand technical trends and their investments help shape the future. VCs do not invest in science/researchers. VCs want to minimize the risk of their investment, so they mostly want to take engineering and manufacturing risk, but less so on applied science risk and rarely on basic research risk. Hence the role of government and Universities.

VCs invest in projects that can take advantage of science and deliver products within the time horizon of their funds (3–7 years). Science often needs decades before a killer app is visible.

As the flow of science-based technologies dries up, the opportunities for U.S. venture capital based on deep tech will decline, with its future in countries that are investing in science – China or Europe.

Why Have Scientists? Why Not Just a Country of Engineers, Entrepreneurs and VCs (or AI)?
If you’ve read so far, you might be scratching your head and asking, “Why do we have scientists at all? Why pay for people to sit around and think? Why spend money on people who run experiments when most of those experiments fail? Can’t we replace them with AI?”

The output of this university-industry-government science partnership became the foundation of Silicon Valley, the aerospace sector, the biotechnology industry, Quantum and AI. These investments gave us rockets, cures for cancer, medical devices, the Internet, Chat GPT, AI and more.

Investment in science is directly correlated with national power. Weaken science, you weaken the long-term growth of the economy, and national defense.

Tech firms’ investments of $100s of billions in AI data centers is greater than the federal government’s R&D expenditures. But these investments are in engineering not in science. The goal of making scientists redundant using artificial general intelligence misses the point that AI will (and is) making scientists more productive – not replacing them.

Countries that neglect science become dependent on those that don’t. U.S. post-WWII dominance came from basic science investments (OSRD, NSF, NIH, DOE labs). After WWII ended, the UK slashed science investment which allowed the U.S. to commercialize the British inventions made during the war.

The Soviet Union’s collapse partly reflected failure to convert science into sustained innovation, during the same time that U.S. universities, startups and venture capital created Silicon Valley. Long-term military and economic advantage (nuclear weapons, GPS, AI) trace back to scientific research ecosystems.

Lessons Learned

  • Scientists come in two categories
    • Theorists and experimentalists
    • Two types of experimentalists; Basic science (learn new things) or applied science (practical applications of the science)
    • Scientists train talent, create patentable inventions and solutions for national defense
  • Engineers design and build things on top of the discoveries of scientists
  • Entrepreneurs test and push the boundaries of what products could be built
  • Venture Capital provides the money to startups
  • Scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs – these roles are complementary
    • Remove one and the system degrades
  • Science won’t stop
    • Cut U.S. funding, then science will happen in other countries that understand its relationship to making a nation great – like China.
    • National power is derived from investments in Science
    • Reducing investment in basic and applied science makes America weak

Appendix – How Does Science Work? – The Scientific Method
Whether you were a theorist or experimentalist, for the last 500 years the way to test science was by using the scientific method. This method starts by a scientist wondering and asking, “Here’s how I think this should work, let’s test the idea.”

The goal of the scientific method is to turn a guess (in science called a hypothesis) into actual evidence. Scientists do this by first designing an experiment to test their guess/hypothesis. They then run the experiment and collect and analyze the result and ask, “Did the result validate, invalidate the hypothesis? Or did it give us completely new ideas?” Scientists build instruments and run experiments not because of what they know, but because of what they don’t know.

These experiments can be simple ones costing thousands of dollars that can be run in a university biology lab while others may require billions of dollars to build a satellite, particle accelerator or telescope. (The U.S. took the lead in Science after WWII when the government realized that funding scientists was good for the American economy and defense.)

Good science is reproducible. Scientists just don’t publish their results, but they also publish the details of how they ran their experiment. That allows other scientists to run the same experiment and see if they get the same result for themselves. That makes the scientific method self-correcting (you or others can see mistakes).

One other benefit of the scientific method is that scientists (and the people who fund them) expect most of the experiments to fail, but the failures are part of learning and discovery. They teach us what works and what doesn’t. Failure in science testing unknowns means learning and discovery.

Filed under: National Security, NIH (National Institutes of Health), NSF (National Science Foundation) | 23 Comments »

Teaching Lean Innovation in the Pandemic

Posted on August 11, 2020 by steve blank

Remote education in the pandemic has been hard for everyone. Hard for students having to deal with a variety of remote instructional methods. Hard for parents with K through 12 students at home trying to keep up with remote learning, and hard for instructors trying to master new barely functional tools and technology while trying to keep students engaged gazing at them through Hollywood Squares-style boxes.

A subsegment of those instructors – those trying to teach Lean LaunchPad, whether in I-Corps, or Hacking for Defense – have an additional burden of figuring out how to teach a class that depends on students getting out of the building and talking to 10 to 15 customers a week.

400 Lean Educators instructors gathered online for a three-hour session to share what we’ve learned about teaching classes remotely. We got insights from each other about tools, tips, techniques and best practices.

Here’s what we learned.

—

When I designed the Lean LaunchPad/I-Corps/Hacking for Defense class, my goal was to replace the traditional method of teaching case studies and instead immerse the students in a hands-on experiential process that modeled what entrepreneurs really did. It would be guided week-to-week by using the Business Model Canvas and testing hypotheses by getting out of the building and building Minimum Viable Products (MVPs). After trial and error, we found that having eight teams presenting in a three-hour block was the maximum without exhausting the instructors and the students. That format, unwieldy as it is, remained the standard for a decade. Over time we started experimenting with breaking up the three-hour block with breakout rooms and other activities so not all students needed to sit through all the presentations.

When the pandemic forced us to shift to online teaching, that experimentation turned into a necessity. Three hours staring at a Zoom screen while listening to team after team present is just untenable and unwatchable. Customer discovery is doable remotely but different. Teams are scattered across the world. And the instructor overhead of managing all this is probably 3X what it is in person.

While we were making changes to our classes at Stanford, Jerry Engel was smart enough to point out that hundreds of instructors in every university were having the same problems in adapting the class to the pandemic. He suggested that as follow-up to our Lean Innovation Educators Summit here in Silicon Valley last December, we should create a mid-year on-line Summit so we could all get together and share what we learned and how we’re adapting.  And so it began.

In July, 400 Educators from over 200 universities in 22 countries gathered online for a Lean Innovation Educators Summit to share best practices.

We began the summit with five of us sharing our experience of how we dealt with the online challenges of:

If you can’t see the presentation slides click here

But the core of the summit was gathering the collective wisdom and experience of the 400 attendees as we split into 22 breakout rooms. The one-hour discussion in each of the rooms covered:

  • What are your biggest challenges under COVID-19?
  • How is this challenge different now than during “in-person” learning?
  • What solutions have you tried?
  • What was most effective?

The output of the breakout sessions provided a firehose of data, a ton of useful suggestions, teaching tips and tools.I’ve summarized the collective notes from the breakout session.

Customer Discovery and Minimal Viable Products
The consensus was, yes you can “get out of the building” when you physically can’t. And it’s almost good enough.

  • Discovery can be done via Zoom or similar remote platforms and in some ways is more effective – see here
  • During Covid most people no longer have gatekeepers around them
    • Sending lots of cold emails works (at least in COVID times)
  • You could find the best mentors and the best sponsor for a given project
  • Building and demonstrating hardware MVPs is a challenge
    • One solution is to send a design file to a fab lab to be printed
    • If you would normally have your potential customer hold, feel or use the product, make sure you video a demo someone doing that
  • For software MVPs create video demo snippets of less <1 minute to illustrate each of your features
  • It’s critical to offer a “How to do customer discovery remotely” and “how to build remote MVPs” workshop

Class Structure
3-hour long classes are challenging in person and require a redesign to be taught online.

  • Keep students engaged by having no more than four teams in a presentation room at one time
    • Have other teams in breakout rooms and/or with other instructors
      • Breakout rooms must be well thought out and organized
      • They should have a task and a deliverable
  • Break up lectures so that they are no longer then 15 minutes
    • Intersperse them with interactive exercises (Alex Osterwalder is a genius here, providing great suggestions for keeping students engaged)
    • Work on an exercise in class and then talk more to it in office hours
    • Avoid canned video lectures
  • Be more prescriptive on “what is required” in the team presentations
  • What’s the goal for the class?
    • Do you want them to test the entire Canvas or …
    • Do you want them to work on product market fit?
      • Teams will naturally gravitate to work on product/market fit
  • Vary the voices at the “front” of the room
  • Guest speakers – previously extraneous but needed now to break up the monotony
    • But if you use guests have the student’s whiteboard summaries of what they learned
    • And have the guests be relevant to the business model topic of the week
  • Understand that while students attend your class they actually pay attention to their mentors
    • Recruit mentors whose first passion are helping students, not recruiting or investing in them
    • Ensure that you train and onboard mentors to the syllabus
    • Have the mentors sit in on the office hours and classroom
  • Invite lurkers, advisors, and others “invited” to show up and chime in
  • Be prepared for the intensity of the preparation required as compared to pre-COVID times
    • Recruiting students and forming teams is especially hard remotely
    • Double or triple down on the email and other outreach
    • Hold on-line info sessions and mixers

Teaching Assistant
Having a Teaching Assistant is critical

  • If your school won’t pay for one, get some unofficial “co-instructors”
    • They don’t have to be a teacher–use an admin or a student intern
  • They are critical to managing the admin side of marketing, recruiting, team formation, communications and overall support for the teaching team.
  • Team formation requires TA heavy lifting of emails/team mixers/team
    • as well as match-making by TA’s and instructors
  • During class TA’S need to be focused on chat, breakout room and presentation logistics
  • Don’t assume (or let your TA assume) that prior practices will work in a virtual environment.
  • Be prepared to try different approaches to keep class moving and engaged
  • Pre-class write up a “How to TA in a Remote Class” handbook
    • Go through it with your TA’s before class
  • Use security in advance; avoid open entry (Zoom Bombing)

Student Engagement
Zoom fatigue came up in almost every breakout session. Some of the solutions included:

  • Play music as students arrive and leave
  • Recognize that some may be in different time zones – take a poll in the first class session
  • Start each class session with an activity
    • Summarize key insights/lessons learned from their office hours and customer discovery
    • For those using Zoom – use the Whiteboard feature for these summaries
  • Have students turn on their camera on to ensure the class they’re engaged
    • And have their microphone off, their full name visible, and a virtual background with their team ID
  • Create deeper connection with the students
    • ask them to anonymously submit a statement or two about what they wish you knew about them
    • ask the students to bring something to class that tells us something about them
      • have them bring it to the breakout rooms to share with their teammates and others
  • Randomly cold call
    • Don’t be afraid to call out students by name, as Zoom format makes raising hand or asking a question more awkward
    • Ask their advice on what someone else just presented or what they learned from the other team
    • After doing this a couple of times, everyone will become active (so not to get called on)
  • Require additional student feedback on chat – critical to keeping engagement high
    • Focus on quality of feedback over just quantity.
    • Have the students and mentors use chat during team presentations to share contacts, insights
  • Dial back the radical candor– take the edge off as the students are already stressed
  • Offer longer office hours for teams

(All the breakout session slides are here.)

Summary
When the National Science Foundation stopped holding their annual conference of I-Corps instructors, it offered us the opportunity to embrace a larger community beyond the NSF – now to include the Hacking for Defense, NSIN, and Lean LaunchPad educators.

When we decided to hold the online summit, we had three hypotheses:

  1. Educators would not only want to attend, but to volunteer and help and learn from each other – validated
  2. Instructors would care most about effective communication with students (not tools, or frameworks but quality of the engagement with students) – validated
  3. Our educator community valued ongoing, recurring opportunities to collaborate and open source ideas and tools – validated

The Common Mission Project is coordinating the group’s efforts to create an open forum where these instructors can share best practices and to curate the best content and solutions.

A big thanks to Jerry Engel of U.C. Berkeley, the dean of this program. And thanks to the Common Mission Project which provided all the seamless logistical support, and every one of the breakout room leaders: Tom Bedecarré – Stanford University, John Blaho – City College of New York, Philip Bouchard – TrustedPeer, Dave Chapman – University College London,  James Chung – George Washington University, Bob Dorf – Columbia University,  Jeff Epstein – Stanford University, Paul Fox – LaSalle University Barcelona,  Ali Hawks – Common Mission Project UK, Jim Hornthal – U.C. Berkeley,  Victoria Larke – University of Toronto,  Radhika Malpani – Google,  Michael Marasco – Northwestern University,  Stephanie Marrus – University of California, San Francisco,  Pete Newell – BMNT/ Common Mission Project US, Thomas O’Neal – University of Central Florida,  Alexander Osterwalder – Strategyzer, Kim Polese – U.C. Berkeley,  Jeff Reid – Georgetown University,  Sid Saleh – Colorado School of Mines,  Chris Taylor – Georgetown University,  Grant Warner – Howard University, Todd Warren – Northwestern University,  Phil Weilerstein – VentureWell,  Steve Weinstein – Stanford University, Naeem Zafar – U.C. Berkeley, and the 400 of you who attended.

Looking forward to our next Educator Summit, December 16th online.

The video of the entire summit can be seen here

Filed under: Hacking For Defense, Lean LaunchPad, NSF (National Science Foundation), Teaching | 7 Comments »

Brown University Talk

Posted on August 24, 2018 by steve blank

Every year I head to the East coast for vacation. We live in a semi-rural area, just ~10,000 people in town, with a potato farm across the street and an arm of the ocean in the backyard. While they own tech, smartphones and computers, most of my neighbors can’t tell you about the latest trends in AI, Bitcoin or Facebook. In contrast, Silicon Valley is an innovation cluster, a monoculture of sorts, with a churning sea of new tech ideas, sailed by entrepreneurs who each passionately believe they’re the next Facebook or Google, with their sails driven by the hurricane winds of investor capital.

The seas are calm here. Most years out here I spend my time reading. This year has been a bit more interesting. One of the things I did was to speak to the startup community in Providence Rhode Island at Brown University.

The talk is here

It’s worth a listen.

7:54: How we used to build startups

11:40: How the Lean Startup began

13:34: Why startups are not smaller versions of large companies

14:06: The three pillars of Lean

20:10: Customer Development is an art

26:42: How we changed the way science is commercialized in the U.S.

29:14: What’s a pivot?

37:34: Customer Discovery isn’t just a bunch of random conversations

39:03: Mistakes that blow a customer meeting

42:45: How you know you’ve talked to enough customers

48:51: Why corporations are mostly doing innovation theater

54:59: Tesla started in my living room

57:28: It takes two: Why world-class startups have both a great innovator and a great entrepreneur

1:04:05: Failure sucks

1:08:43: Avoiding the startup deathtrap

1:13:22: Talk to the crazy people

1:16:05: How you know when you stop being a startup

Filed under: Customer Development, NSF (National Science Foundation), Venture Capital | 6 Comments »

We Have A Moral Obligation

Posted on June 21, 2017 by steve blank

I was in Boston and was interviewed by The Growth Show about my current thinking about innovation in companies and government agencies.The interviewer was great and managed to get me to summarize several years of learning in one podcast.

It’s worth a listen.

At the end of the interview I got surprised by a great question – “What’s the Problem that Still Haunts You?”  I wasn’t really prepared for the question but gave the best answer I could on the fly.

Part of the answer is the title of this blog post.

Listen to the entire interview here:
Taking the Lean Startup From Silicon Valley to Corporations and the State and Defense Department

Or just parts of the interview:
1:20  Failure and Lessons Learned

Filed under: Corporate/Gov't Innovation, Customer Development, Hacking For Defense, Hacking for Diplomacy, Lean LaunchPad, NSF (National Science Foundation), Teaching | 6 Comments »

Innovation – something both parties can agree on

Posted on January 15, 2017 by steve blank

icorps-logoOn the last day Congress was in session in 2016, Democrats and Republicans agreed on a bill that increased innovation and research for the country.

For me, seeing Congress pass this bill, the American Innovation and Competitiveness Act, was personally satisfying. It made the program I helped start, the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (I-Corps) a permanent part of the nation’s science ecosystem. I-Corps uses Lean Startup methods to teach scientists how to turn their discoveries into entrepreneurial, job-producing businesses.  I-Corps bridges the gap between public support of basic science and private capital funding of new commercial ventures. It’s a model for a government program that’s gotten the balance between public/private partnerships just right. Over 1,000 teams of our nation’s best scientists have been through the program.

The bill directs the expansion of I-Corps to additional federal agencies and academic institutions, as well as through state and local governments.  The new I-Corps authority also supports prototype or proof-of-concept development activities, which will better enable researchers to commercialize their innovations. The bill also explicitly says that turning federal research into companies is a national goal to promote economic growth and benefit society. For the first time, Congress has recognized the importance of government-funded entrepreneurship and commercialization education, training, and mentoring programs specifically saying that this will improve the nation’s competitiveness. And finally this bill acknowledges that networks of entrepreneurs and mentors are critical in getting technologies translated from the lab to the marketplace.

uncle-sam-2This bipartisan legislation was crafted by senators Cory Gardner (R–CO) and Gary Peters (D–MI). Senator John Thune (R–SD) chairs the Senate commerce and science committee that crafted S. 3084. After years of contention over reauthorizing the National Science Foundation, House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith and Ranking Member Eddie Bernice Johnson worked to negotiate the agreement that enabled both the House and the Senate to pass this bill.

While I was developing the class at Stanford, it was my counterparts at the NSF who had the vision to make the class a national program.  Thanks to Errol Arkilic, Don Millard, Babu Dasgupta, Anita LaSalle (as well as current program leaders Lydia McClure, Steven Konsek) and the over 100 instructors at the 53 universities who teach the program across the U.S.

NSF I-Corps Oct 2011But I haven’t forgotten that before everyone else thought that teaching scientists how to build companies using Lean Methods might be a good for the country, there was one congressman who got it first.  lipinskiIN 2012, Representative Dan Lipinski (D-Il), co-chair of the House STEM Education Caucus, got on an airplane and flew to Stanford to see the class first-hand.

For the first few years Lipinski was a lonely voice in Congress saying that we’ve found a better way to train our scientists to create companies and jobs.

This bill is a reauthorization of the 2010 America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science (COMPETES) Act, which set out policies that govern the NSF, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and federal programs on innovation, manufacturing, and science and math education. Reauthorization bills don’t fund an agency, but they provide policy guidance.  It resolved partisan differences over how NSF should conduct peer review and manage research.

I-Corps is the  accelerator that helps scientists bridge the commercialization gap between their research in their labs and wide-scale commercial adoption and use.

Why This Matters
While a few of the I-Corps teams are in web/mobile/cloud, most are working on advanced technology projects that don’t make TechCrunch. You’re more likely to see their papers (in material science, robotics, diagnostics, medical devices, computer hardware, etc.) in Science or Nature.

I-Corps uses everything we know about building Lean Startups and Evidence-based Entrepreneurship to connect innovation to entrepreneurship. It’s curriculum is built on a framework of business model design, customer development and agile engineering – and its emphasis on evidence, Lessons Learned versus demos, makes it the worlds most advanced accelerator. It’s success is measured not only by the technologies that leave the labs, but how many U.S. scientists and engineers we train as entrepreneurs and how many of them pass on their knowledge to students. I-Corps is our secret weapon to integrate American innovation and entrepreneurship into every U.S. university lab.

Every time I go to Washington and spend time at the National Science Foundation or National Institute of Health I’m reminded why the U.S. leads the world in support of basic and applied science.  It’s not just the money we pour into these programs (~$125 billion/year), but the people who have dedicated themselves to make the world a better place by advancing science and technology for the common good.

Congratulations to everyone in making the Innovation Corps a national standard.

Filed under: Lean LaunchPad, NSF (National Science Foundation), Science and Industrial Policy | 10 Comments »

So Here’s What I’ve Been Thinking…

Posted on December 4, 2016 by steve blank

I was interviewed at the Stanford Business School and in listening to the podcast, I realize I repeated some of my usual soundbites but embedded in the conversation were a few things I’ve never shared before about service.

Listen here:

Steve Blank on Silicon Valley, AI and the Future of Innovation

Download the .mp3 here:

Download Episode

Filed under: China, Hacking For Defense, NSF (National Science Foundation), Science and Industrial Policy, Teaching | Leave a comment »

Doubling Down On a Good Thing: The National Science Foundation’s I-Corps Lite

Posted on May 12, 2015 by steve blank

I’ve known Edmund Pendleton from the University of Maryland as the Director of the D.C. National Science Foundation (NSF) I-Corps Node (a collaboration among the University of Maryland, Virginia Tech, George Washington, and Johns Hopkins). edmund pendeltonBut it wasn’t until seeing him lead the first I-Corps class at the National Institutes of Health that I realized Edmund could teach my class better than I can.

After seeing the results of 500+ teams through the I-Corps, the NSF now offers all teams who’ve received government funding to start a company an introduction to building a Lean Startup.

Here’s Edmund’s description of the I-Corps Lite program.

SBIR/STTR Program and Startup Seed Funding
The Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs are startup seed funds created by Congress to encourage U.S. small businesses to turn Government-funded research into commercial businesses. Eleven U.S. agencies participate in the SBIR/STTR program, with DOD, HHS (NIH), NSF, DOE, and NASA offering the majority of funding opportunities.SBIR and STTR program

The SBIR/STTR program made ~6,200 seed stage investments in 2014, dwarfing the seed investments made by venture capital. seed stage investmentThe SBIR/STTR program represents a critical source of seed funding for U.S. startups that don’t fit whatever’s hot in venture capital. In fact, half of all seed stages in tech companies in the U.S. were funded by the SBIR program.

The SBIR/STTR program
The SBIR/STTR program funds companies in three phases. Phase I funding is for teams to prove feasibility, both technical and commercial.

Since most of the founders come from strong technical roots, companies in Phase I tend to focus on the technology – and spend very little time understanding what it takes to turn the company’s technology into a scalable and repeatable commercial business.

SBIR PhasesIn 2011 the National Science Foundation recognized that many of the innovators they were funding were failing – not from an inability to make their technologies work – but because they did not understand how to translate the technology into a successful business. To address this problem, the NSF collaborated with Steve Blank to adapt his Lean LaunchPad class at Stanford for NSF-funded founders. By focusing on hypothesis testing, the Lean LaunchPad had actually developed something akin to the scientific method for entrepreneurship. (see here, here and the results here.) This was an approach that would immediately make sense to the scientists and technologists NSF was funding. Steve and the NSF collaborated on adapting his curriculum and the result was the 9-week NSF I-Corps program.

NSF’s original I-Corps program was specifically designed for academic innovators still in the lab; fundamentally, to help them determine the best path to commercialization before they moved to the start-up stage. (I-Corps participants are at the “pre-company” stage.) But NSF realized the Lean LaunchPad approach would be equally beneficial for the many startups they fund through the SBIR/STTR program.Icorps plus SBIR

The “Beat the Odds” Bootcamp – an I-Corps “Lite”
The good news is that the NSF found that the I-Corps program works spectacularly well. But the class requires a substantial time commitment for the founding team to get out of the building and talk to 10-15 customers a week, and then present what they learned – the class is essentially a full time commitment.

Was there a way to expose every one of ~240 companies/year who receive a NSF grant to the I-Corps? The NSF decided to pilot a “Beat the Odds Boot Camp” (essentially an I-Corps Lite) at the biannual gathering of new SBIR/STTR Phase I grantees in Washington.

Steve provided an overview of the Lean LaunchPad methodology in an introductory webinar. Then the companies were sent off to do customer discovery before coming to an optional “bootcamp workshop” 12 weeks later. Four certified I-Corps instructors provided feedback to these companies at the workshop. The results of the pilot were excellent. The participating companies learned a significant amount about their business models, even in this very light-touch approach. The NSF SBIR/STTR program had found a way to improve the odds of building a successful company.Icorps lite plus sbir

During the past two years, I’ve taken the lead to expand and head up this program, building on what Steve started. We now require the participating companies to attend kick-off and mid-point webinars, and to conduct 30 customer interviews over the twelve-week program. The companies present to I-Corps instructors at a “Beat the Odds Bootcamp” – the day before the biannual NSF Phase I Grantee Workshop.

In March we conducted our fourth iteration of this workshop with a record number of companies participating (about 110 of 120, or 90%) and 14 certified I-Corps instructors giving feedback to teams. This time, we added afternoon one-on-one sessions with the teams in addition to group presentations in the morning. Companies are very happy with the program, and many have requested even more face time with I-Corps instructors throughout the process.

The smart companies in Phase I realize that this Bootcamp program provides a solid foundation for success in Phase II, when more dollars are available.

What’s Next
Currently, once these teams leave I-Corps Lite, they do not have any “formal” touch points with their instructors. Over time, we hope to offer more services to the teams and develop a version of I-Corps (I-Corps-Next?) for Phase II grantees.

We envision even greater startup successes if SBIR/STTR funded teams can take advantage of I-Corps classes through their entire life cycle:

  • “Pre-company” academic researchers – current I-Corps
  • Phase I SBIR/STTR teams – current I-Corps Lite
  • Phase II SBIR/STTR teams – develop a new I-Corps Next class

Icorps next plus SBIR ii and iii

The emphasis and format would change for each, but all would be solidly rooted in the Lean LaunchPad methodology. And of course, we don’t want to stop with only NSF teams/companies…as we all know. The opportunity is huge, and we can have a significant impact on the country’s innovation ecosystem.

Summary
NSF led the development of the SBIR program in the late 1970s. It has since been adopted by the entire federal research community. We believe NSF’s leadership with I-Corps will deliver something of equal significance… a program that teaches scientists and engineers what it takes to turn those research projects into products and services for the benefit of society.  I-Corps Lite is one more piece of that program.

Lessons Learned

  • The SBIR/STTR program is a critical source of seed funding for technology startups that don’t fit the “whatever’s hot” category for venture capital
  • The program is a national treasure and envied around the world, but we can (and should) improve it.
  • SBIR/STTR Phase I applicants needed more help with “commercial feasibility”…a perfect fit for business model design, customer discovery and agile engineering – so we rolled out the NSF I-Corps
  • The I-Corps was so successful we wanted more NSF funded entrepreneneurs, not just a select few, to be exposed to the Lean methodology – so we built I-Corps Lite

Filed under: Customer Development, Lean LaunchPad, NSF (National Science Foundation), Teaching | 3 Comments »

Blowing up the Business Plan at U.C. Berkeley Haas Business School

Posted on March 3, 2015 by steve blank

During the Cold War with the Soviet Union, science and engineering at both Stanford and U.C. Berkeley were heavily funded to develop Cold War weapon systems. Stanford’s focus was Electronic Intelligence and those advanced microwave components and systems were useful in a variety of weapons systems. Starting in the 1950’s, Stanford’s engineering department became “outward facing” and developed a culture of spinouts and active faculty support and participation in the first wave of Silicon Valley startups.

At the same time Berkeley was also developing Cold War weapons systems. However its focus was nuclear weapons – not something you wanted to be spinning out. So Berkeley started a half century history of “inward facing innovation” focused on the Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons lab. (See the presentation here.)

Given its inward focus, Berkeley has always been the neglected sibling in Silicon Valley entrepreneurship. That has changed in the last few years.

Today the U.C. Berkeley Haas Business School is a leader in entrepreneurship education. It has replaced how to write a business plan with hands-on Lean Startup methods. It’s teaching the LaunchPad® and the I-Corps for the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, as well as corporate entrepreneurship courses.haas logo

Here’s the story from Andre Marquis, Executive Director of Berkeley’s Lester Center for Entrepreneurship.

—–

When I came to U.C. Berkeley in 2010 to run the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship in the Haas School of Business we were teaching entrepreneurship the same way as when I was a student back in 1995. Our core MBA class used the seminal textbook New Venture Creation by Jeffrey Timmons of Babson College that was first published in 1977. The final deliverable for that class was a 30-page business plan. We had multiple business plan competitions. As I looked around at other schools, I saw pretty much the same landscape – business plan classes, business plan competitions and loosely coupled accelerators that focused primarily on mentoring.

Over my career as a serial entrepreneur I observed that since the late 1990s, no early-stage Silicon Valley investor had used business plans to screen investments. Even those who asked for them never read them. Traction and evidence from customers were what investors were looking for – even in “slow” sectors like healthcare and energy. There had been tectonic shifts in the startup world, but our business school curriculum had barely moved.

There was a big gap in our educational paradigm. To create great entrepreneurs, we had to give our students the experience of navigating the chaos and uncertainty of running a lean startup while providing the same kind of rigorous framework the business plan did in its day. The advantage of following New Venture Creation is that it had a deep pedagogical infrastructure that students took away after they left school. The disadvantage is that its methodology was based on the old waterfall model of product development and not the agile and lean methods that startups use today.

As I began my search to increase the relevance of our entrepreneurship curriculum with the same rigor as Timmons and New Venture Creation, I found the answer right here at Berkeley, in Steve Blank’s Lean LaunchPad class.

(Our founding Executive Director Jerry Engel, recently retired to become dean of faculty for the National Science Foundation I-Corps, had a tradition of incorporating leading practioners, like Steve. These ‘pracademics’ proved to be some of the biggest innovators in entrepreneurship education.)

Seeing Is Believing
The Lean LaunchPad class was completely different from a traditional entrepreneurship class. It taught lean theory (business model design, customer development and agile engineering) and practice.

Every week, each student team stood in front of the class and presented their business model hypotheses, what they had learned from talking to customers, demo’d their minimal viable products and had to explain what they were going to do next. Steve and the venture capitalists at the back of the room relentlessly peppered them with questions and pushed them to get out of the building and call on the real decision-makers instead of talking to people they already knew. Some teams stepped down from the podium proud that they had made real progress that week while others were chastised because they stuck to their comfort zone, were not doing the tough work required by entrepreneurs and on the road to failure.

I realized this class was teaching students exactly what it felt like to be an entrepreneur! Great entrepreneurs are on a search for the truth, no matter how wrong their initial conception is. Being an entrepreneur is about starting out with no idea whether you are working on the next big thing or something no one wants and certainly no one will pay for. It’s struggling to find the right path forward through chaos and uncertainty. Killing bad ideas quickly and moving on. Staring at the phone while mentally wrestling to pick it up to make that next cold call. It’s having investors tell you that you’re dead wrong and, perhaps with enough customer traction, showing them the path to a new future neither of you could see at the time.

And there it was. The Lean LaunchPad was unlike any class I’d ever seen.

As a Silicon Valley entrepreneur I had lived the lean approach, yet I had never seen it taught. Done informally as part of an accelerator, yes, but not with a framework based on a clear process and clear pedagogy. The Lean LaunchPad was teaching students concepts and a process that they took away from the class and could use again for their next startup. I realized I was looking at a paradigm shift in entrepreneurial education – away from the business plan-focused model to a Lean Startup model. (The irony is that once you’ve gone through the lean cycle, you have all the information that goes in a business plan: customers, sales strategy, product features, and financial metrics. It’s just that they are validated instead of made up.)

The Business Plan is Dead
Now, 4 years after I arrived at BerkeleyHaas, we don’t teach business plan writing in any of our entrepreneurship classes or in any of our dozens of programs and competitions. We use Customer Development and the Lean LaunchPad to train and accelerate teams U.C. Berkeley-wide.

We’ve gone global as well. In the past year alone, we’ve taught over 250 teams, over 1,000 entrepreneurs and their mentors in dozens of countries how to create scalable startups in domains from software and hardware to healthcare and energy.

Haas global footprint

Haas global footprint

The international teams watch the lectures online, get out of the building, present to us each week via WebEx and get the same brand of relentless and direct feedback their U.C. Berkeley peers got in Steve’s class. For example, our Intel Technology To Market Accelerator took 22 teams from 11 countries across 15 time zones, from northern Russia to southern Chile and from Saudi Arabia to the U.S. (Chicago) through the Lean LaunchPad process. Clearly, lean works globally.

And we’ve been part of the U.S. effort to use the Lean LaunchPad to accelerate commercialization for the country’s best research spinouts from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health. We do this by running classes for the NSF Innovation Corps and The I-Corps at the NIH. And the same lean techniques work just as well in the corporate innovation programs we run such as the Intel Make It Wearable Challenge.

An important distinction is that these programs are accelerators. The teams in them start with an idea or product, meet with customers, build prototypes and search for a scalable business model. All declare their startup a “go” or “no go” at the end. They learn it’s all about building to scale, pivoting or declaring failure, and moving on using a hypothesis-driven search for the truth.

Even our venerable 15-year old business plan competition, once dubbed “bplan,” has transformed into LAUNCH, a multi-month accelerator with a rigorous process combining the Lean LaunchPad, agile product development and a focus on measurable Lean Analytics. Ironically, LAUNCH has turned out to be much more rigorous than the prior business plan competition because we immerse every entrepreneur and their mentors in conquering the chaos and uncertainty that is normal for startups. We expect them to come out with specific knowledge of their markets and business ecosystem, verified metrics, a product and a plan for moving forward based on interacting with their actual customers – not honing the teams for a beauty pageant-like pitch fest or making them produce a business plan that’s fundamentally speculative. As educators, we are having a deep impact on these entrepreneurs and their startups.

Lean LaunchPad Works Across Industries
I often hear the concern that the Lean LaunchPad only works for software. After 700 teams in robotics, materials, hardware, therapeutics, diagnostics, medical devices, and enterprise software, it’s clear that Lean Startup methods work across all industries. We’ve taught versions of the Lean LaunchPad for life sciences at UCSF and as part of the National Institutes of Health, for hardware-focused startups making wearable devices as part of the Intel Make It Wearable Challenge, for teams working on nanotechnology and in education (STEMKids and Build and Imagine). Two of our BerkeleyHaas Faculty, Jorge Calderon and Will Rosenzweig, created a Social Lean LaunchPad class that embraces the mission and stakeholders central to social ventures.

Whether it’s making iPhone apps or medical devices, every startup is looking for a repeatable and scalable business model. Focusing on finding customer needs, figuring out how they buy and how to scale up product delivery are universal.

Where We Are Going From Here
At U.C. Berkeley we’ve undergone a complete transformation in just four years. But the longer journey is to continue to build new lean-tools and classes separate from the 40 year-old, business plan-based tradition.

We continue to ask ourselves, “What can we do to get our students out of the classroom, in cross-functional teams, building for specific customers and having the experience of making hard decisions under conditions of uncertainty? What can we do to expand and deepen the rigor of the Lean Startup methodologies and fully elaborate our curriculum?”

At BerkeleyHaas we are sharing what we are learning (see below). By embracing lean, you can be assured you will be giving your students essential innovation skills they will use for the rest of their lives. You will see great startups focused on solving real customer problems emerge as well. This is an exciting journey and we are all right at the start.

Some resources for shifting the paradigm in your organization:

Lessons Learned

  • Early-stage investors don’t read business plans
  • We are in the middle of a shift in entrepreneurship education from teaching the waterfall model of startup development (enshrined in business plans) to teaching the lean startup model
  • The Lean LaunchPad process works across a wide range of domains – from science and engineering to healthcare, energy, government, the social sector and for corporate innovation
  • Customer Development works outside Silicon Valley. In fact, it works globally
  • The Lean LaunchPad is a business process that teaches entrepreneurs and innovators to make business-focused, evidence-based decisions under conditions of chaos and uncertainty. It’s a big idea

Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan, Customer Development, Lean LaunchPad, NSF (National Science Foundation), Teaching | 3 Comments »

The Big Bang. The Lean LaunchPad explodes at University of Maryland

Posted on December 10, 2014 by steve blank

The University of Maryland is now integrating the Lean LaunchPad® into standard innovation and entrepreneurship courses across all 12 colleges within the University. Over 44 classes have embedded the business model canvas and/or Customer Discovery including a year-long course taken by every single one of its bioengineering majors.

It’s made a big bang.

Here’s the story from Dean Chang, UMD’s Associate Vice President for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

———————————————–

Two decades ago, Steve Blank completely changed the course and fortunes of a Stanford spinout startup called Immersion. I was lucky to be one of the very early people at Immersion and met Steve when he came on as one of our first board members. It was Steve who first brought Will Harvey to visit Immersion, which led to a strategic investment in There.com, Will’s stealth-mode but sure-fire, can’t-miss startup.

Present at the Creation
We didn’t know it at the time, but with that investment we had paid for front-row VIP seats to witness the origins of Customer Development and the Lean Startup. There.com is where Will first met and hired Eric Ries and had the painful and formative experiences that directly led to them starting over and co-founding IMVU while auditing Steve’s Lean LaunchPad course. With Eric Ries as the first practioner of Customer Development, Steve wrote Four Steps to the Epiphany, Eric wrote Lean Startup, and – BANG – Customer Development and Lean Startup were born!

Twenty years and 100,000’s of copies of those books later, my life has fortuitously intersected with Steve Blank once again now that we’ve both become educators. In my second go-around with Steve Blank, he’s still changing the course and fortunes of startups everywhere, but perhaps more profoundly, he’s now also changing the course of universities and students everywhere as a result of a program he developed with the National Science Foundation (NSF).

It’s a Capitol Idea
The DC, Maryland, and Virginia (DMV) region represents the most fertile science and technology region in the country with about $30 billion in federally-funded R&D. However, the region has historically underperformed in translating its enormous R&D output into impact.

When Steve and NSF created the I-Corps™ program in 2011, I approached Edmund Pendleton from University of Maryland, Jim Chung from George Washington University and Jack Lesko from Virginia Tech with the idea that together we could leverage the respective strengths of our institutions, and catalyze the region through I-Corps. In 2012, we applied for and then were awarded a grant from NSF to do just that. We created the DC I-Corps Regional Node to teach the Lean LaunchPad curriculum to top scientists, innovators, and students from around the country and from our region. Since 2013, DC I-Corps has trained over 150 teams with the kind of impact NSF and Steve envisioned when they launched the program. That impact is now accelerating with the DC I-Corps node’s addition of the #1 research university in the country (Johns Hopkins) in 2014.

UMD LLP Ecosystem

Teaching the Big Bang to Undergraduates
University of Maryland’s President Wallace Loh’s commitment to engage every student in all 12 colleges in innovation and entrepreneurship resulted in UMD aggressively leveraging its I-Corps and Lean LaunchPad experience inside undergraduate classrooms.

Our FedTech class pairs students with some of the most promising technologies from NASA, DOD and several other of the 87 federal labs located in the DMV region. Federal labs like DOE literally have tens of thousands of inventions that they’d like to have vetted for commercial potential, so FedTech students search for a repeatable and scalable business model for those fed lab technologies using the Lean LaunchPad framework. Students get course credit, a fantastic learning experience, and in some cases, even a job offer or career opportunity with the federal lab or with an industry contact made during interviews.

Elements of the business model canvas and/or discovery-based interviews of stakeholders have already been incorporated into 44 other classes at UMD. But the biggest impact of 2014 has been from incorporating the Lean LaunchPad curriculum into our signature, year-long senior capstone course in bioengineering. This means that every single University of Maryland student in the Fischell Department of Bioengineering is now required to not only design a real biomedical device but also take that design through rigorous, evidence-based Customer Development in order to graduate. 

Truth be told, we took a page out of Frank Rimalovski’s playbook at NYU and paid for Yang Tao to attend the Lean LaunchPad Educators Program.  He’s the professor who teaches the bioengineering capstone course, and he returned from Steve’s ranch inspired and determined to weave the Lean LaunchPad into the fabric of the capstone course. So what’s happened so far?

Impact of the Big Bang on University of Maryland Bioengineering
In this capstone course students visit the University of Maryland medical school and shadow doctors, nurses, and other hospital workers to learn about problems and needs, which is an ideal set up for customer interviews and discovery. They spend the year working with the doctors and the life sciences venture community to design devices and other solutions to those problems and needs.

Before Lean LaunchPad was added to the bioengineering capstone class, some beautiful devices were designed and manufactured with many students never knowing whether the value proposition for what they made was beneficial enough to all the right people to warrant adoption or if the customer segment they targeted was the right one and made financial sense.

Now the students spend time in customer discovery and learn why validating the business model for their device is so important. As they target the different parts of the canvas, they begin to understand how things like improved healthcare, purchasing, reimbursement, and regulatory must fit into a successful business model.

Some students will find that their device is an engineering marvel but would never fly in the market for reasons they weren’t even aware of until they did their “outside of the classroom” customer interviews. Co-instructor Martha Connolly thinks that’s a perfectly good outcome because they’ve still learned the process of designing and making a biomedical device but they’ve also learned equally valuable lessons from the Lean LaunchPad process that will be applicable in any future endeavors, whatever they may be.

The real proof of Lean LaunchPad’s impact is that the students are clamoring for it.

Can I Have More?
In fact, two UMD bioengineering students, Shawn Greenspan and Stephanie Cohen, went through the capstone course last year before Lean LaunchPad was integrated. They were so upset that they missed out on the Lean LaunchPad version of the course that they teamed up with Dr. Ron Samet, a very entrepreneurial professor of anesthesiology from the medical school, to take the class through this fall’s National Science Foundation I-Corps regional program taught in the D.C. area.

UMDAccording to Shawn and Stephanie, I-Corps taught them what they didn’t get from the traditional capstone course without Lean LaunchPad:

“I-Corps finally put us on the road to real customer discovery. Our initial business plan started with an incorrectly identified buyer, value propositions that were wrong, and guesses everywhere else. Fortunately after 67 interviews we now have a fully developed customer segment identifying each customer type, the key value propositions, and a developing revenue model.

We still have lots of work to do. The left side of our canvas has more questions than answers. Five weeks ago, that was scary to admit, but now we know where our answers lie: outside the building.”

This kind of feedback from students is particularly gratifying. Not only did the experience have the kind of impact we had hoped for, but it’s also turned into a potential career opportunity for Shawn and Stephanie as they’re completing their master’s programs.

What’s Next?
Four more Lean LaunchPad initiatives are either on tap or about to be scaled up:

Being a node instructor in the I-Corps @ NIH program has allowed me to work with some terrific experts in life sciences and healthcare ventures and spread that expertise to DC I-Corps and UMD programs. Next month, I’ll be a node instructor in NSF’s upcoming I-Corps for Learning program where we aim to teach STEM educators how to scale their teaching innovations to a wider audience. That experience should again result in great learnings to bring back and apply at UMD.

When I witnessed the Big Bang origins of Customer Development and Lean Startup 20 years ago during my first encounter with Steve Blank, I could not have guessed how fast it would impact the startup world, and now universities and students. If the past is prologue, the future is going to be fantastic!

Lessons Learned

  • University of Maryland has gone “all in” with the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps and discovery-based learning from stakeholders
  • I-Corps has been a great investment for the country. Regardless if they take startup path, students gain invaluable skills
  • Elective courses are great, but the big win comes from embedding Lean LaunchPad in existing required courses
  • Students can create job and career opportunities through their customer discovery interactions
  • The impact on life sciences and healthcare is evident in the UMD bioengineering program and in the NIH program
  • The Lean LaunchPad process is equally well-suited to areas like STEM education and government (e.g., fed labs, HHS)

Filed under: Lean LaunchPad, NSF (National Science Foundation), Teaching | 4 Comments »

Impact! NYU Scales the Lean LaunchPad

Posted on November 20, 2014 by steve blank

NYU has adopted the Lean LaunchPad® class as a standard entrepreneurship course across twelve different schools/colleges within the University. Over 1,000 students a year are learning lean startup concepts.

Impact!shutterstock_132023192

—–

In August 2011 I received an email from someone at NYU I never heard of. Frank Rimalovski, the Executive Director of the NYU Entrepreneurial Institute, had just read about the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (I-Corps) in my blog, and he absolutely had to meet me. To Frank’s credit he wouldn’t take no for an answer. When I said, “I’m too busy,” Frank said he’d fly out to fit into my schedule. When I said, “I’m at my ranch on the coast,” Frank promised to drive to Santa Cruz as soon as he get off the plane.

I figured any academic who was as persistent as an entrepreneur had earned my time.

So we met, and I learned a lot. First, I learned that Frank was not your typical academic. He was a career VC, now at NYU and charged with building an entrepreneurial ecosystem across the university. Frank’s goal in the meeting was to figure out how to ensure that NYU would be one of the new universities selected when the National Science Foundation scaled the Innovation Corps nationally. (The Innovation Corps, or I-Corps for short, is my Stanford Lean LaunchPad class offered by the National Science Foundation to our leading scientists. The Lean LaunchPad class teaches students how to build a Lean Startup using business model design, customer development and agile engineering. Teams have to get out of the building and talk to 10-15 customers a week.) I gave Frank the same advice I offered all the other universities who asked. But the difference was that Frank took it and made it part of the NYU proposal.

In 2012 NYU partnered with the City University of NY (CUNY) and Columbia University, and in early 2013 they won a grant from the National Science Foundation to build the Innovation Corps in New York City and jointly create the the NYC Regional Innovation Node (NYCRIN).

Spend it Wisely
As part of the National Science Foundation I-Corps program, NYU was responsible for training our country’s top scientists – and they’ve taught 170 of them so far.

But what NYU did with the rest of their grant dollars was simply brilliant. Over the last two years they used part of the National Science Foundation funds to send eight NYU faculty to California attend the Lean LaunchPad Educators program. (The Educators Program is a 2½ day class that teaches faculty how to create and teach their own Lean LaunchPad class.) In exchange the faculty had to agree to teach a Lean LaunchPad class at NYU within the next year. Unbelievably, they’ve delivered – and more. By this spring there will be 9 different Lean LaunchPad classes with 12 NYU instructors (and several more gearing up) teaching Lean at 12 of the schools/colleges within NYU. Some of these were brand new classes while others adapted existing business, design and engineering curricula to utilize the Lean approach.

NYU Lean 2

Spread it Widely
In two short years, the Lean LaunchPad has had a major impact on teaching entrepreneurship at NYU. Starting this year all 750 incoming freshman at the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering take the required Innovation and Technology Forum class. The class has been updated to cover the key elements of the Lean Startup (customer development, customer segments & value propositions, product/market fit, and minimal viable products)!

In addition, 165 students from twelve different schools/colleges within the University took the full Lean LaunchPad class this year. And in each of the past two summers 10 teams with 30 students participated in the NYU Summer Launchpad accelerator program. Frank even convinced me to come to New York and teach a five-day 10-hour-a-day Lean LaunchPad class with him and his team each August.

Student Impact
While classes offered and curriculums built are impressive, what really matters is whether we had any impact on the students. Did we open new eyes? Encourage new startups? Change lives? To my surprise the impact has been clear and immediate. A few of the students wrote blogs about their experience in the classes.  Here are a a few quotes that stand out:

Tlacael Esparza recently received his masters in music tech from NYU Steinhardt and is the co-founder of Sensory Percussion.  “…I found the idea of doing 10-15 customer interviews a week daunting and distracting. How can I commit to “getting out of the building” when I have so much more work to do building and improving our first product? … However, going through the customer development process showed me the danger in that kind of thinking. In talking to musicians and music producers…there was a lot to be learned about how our competitors’ products are perceived and used and how Sensory Percussion would fit into the current eco-system.” Read Tlacael’s blog post about his Summer Launchpad experience here.

Fang-Ke Huang is a postdoctoral fellow in NYU Langone Medical Center, applying the proteomic approach to understand the brain’s functionalities such as learning and memory.  “…(The) class taught me not only the importance of customers, but also the application of the scientific method to the business model...I also learned that an entrepreneur should have a productive attitude towards setbacks. …, I started to view setbacks as a chance for feedback and as opportunities to redirect my efforts.”  Fang-Ke’s blog about the class is here.

Make it Better
Last but not least, Frank thought that neither the Four Steps to the Epiphany nor the Startup Owners Manual had enough specific advice on Customer Development. (Ouch.) I told him that if he thought he could do better he should write his own book. So Frank did. He collaborated with Giff Constable and wrote Talking to Humans: Success Starts with Understanding Your Customers to guide aspiring entrepreneurs through the process of securing, conducting and synthesizing early customer discovery interviews. And you know what? It is a great book. I used it in the I-Corps @ NIH program, and it’s now one of my class texts.

What’s Next?
From my time at NYU last summer, it was clear there is already a growing demand and interest from faculty and administrators alike to apply Lean in life science and healthcare at NYU. Now that the National Institute of Health has run an I-Corps class specifically targeted for Life Science and Healthcare (therapeutics, diagnostics, medical devices and digital health), there’s now a Lean LaunchPad curriculum for Frank’s next target –  bringing the Lean LaunchPad class into the NYU Medical Center in 2015

Lessons Learned

  • The National Science Foundation Innovation Corps has been a great investment for the country
  • It’s spurred a renaissance in entrepreneurial education
  • NYU has grabbed the opportunity with both hands
  • They’ve made one heck of an impact in just two years
  • I can’t wait to see what they do next

Filed under: Lean LaunchPad, NSF (National Science Foundation), Teaching | 7 Comments »

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