Steve Blank Science and Industrial Policy

The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency Goes Lean

Posted on August 29, 2016 by steve blank

We tend to associate the government with words like bureaucracy rather than lean innovation. But smart people within government agencies are working to change the culture and embrace new ways of doing things. The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) is a great example.

The NGA, an organization within the U.S. Department of Defense, delivers geospatial intelligence (satellite imagery video, and other sensor data) to policymakers, warfighters, intelligence professionals and first responders.

A team from their Enterprise Innovation Office has joined us at NYU as observers at our 5-day Lean LaunchPad class, while another team is in Silicon Valley with the Hacking for Defense team learning how to turn their hard problems into partnerships with commercial companies that lead to deployed solutions.

The Innovation Insurgency
Over the last year the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) has become part of the “Innovation Insurgency” inside the U.S. Department of Defense by adopting Lean Methodology inside their agency.

In July the NGA hosted the inaugural 2016 Intelligence Community Innovation Conference with attendees from across the Department of Defense and public sector. At the conference Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Air Force Gen. Paul Selva said, “Implementing innovation [in the government and large organizations] is like a turning battleship, you may have an upset crew with cooks having to clean up spilled food and sailors falling out of beds but that ship can turn with effort. The end result is often that change can happen but it is going to come at the cost of disruption and difficulty.”

The good news for the country is that the leadership of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency has decided to turn the ship now.

To connect to innovation centers outside the agency, their research group has set up “NGA Outpost Valley” (NOV), an innovation outpost in Silicon Valley. The NOV is building an ecosystem of innovative companies around NGA’s hard problems to rapidly deploy solutions to solve them.

To promote innovation inside the NGA, they’ve staffed an Enterprise Innovation Office (EIO) to coach, educate and advise the entire agency, from core leadership to the operational edges, with methods and concepts of validated learning through rapid experimentation and customer development.

The NGA has adopted Lean Innovation methods to make this happen. The process starts by collecting agency-wide ideas and/or customer problems, collecting a group insight, and sorts which problems are important enough to pursue. The innovation process uses the Value Proposition canvas, customer development and the Mission Model Canvas to validate hypotheses and deliver minimum viable products. This process allows the agency to rapidly deliver projects at speed.

To help start this innovation program the NGA’s Enterprise Innovation Office has had their innovation teams go through the already established Innovation-Corps classes at the National Security Agency (NSA), and they’re about to stand up their own Innovation-Corps curriculum inside the NGA. (The Innovation-Corps (I-Corps for short) Program is the Lean Innovation class I developed at Stanford and teach there and at Berkeley, Columbia and NYU. It was first adopted by the National Science Foundation and is now offered at 54 universities, and starting last year taught in all research agencies and the DOD.)

This past week a team from the NGA’s Enterprise Innovation Office observed the 5-day Lean LaunchPad class I’m teaching at NYU. Their goal is to integrate these techniques into their own Lean innovation processes. From their comments and critiques of the students, they’re more then ready to teach it themselves.

At the same time the NGA Outpost Valley team was in Silicon Valley going through a Hacking for Defense workshop (we call a “sprint.”) Their goal was to translate one of their problems into a language that commercial companies in the valley could understand and solve, then to figure out how to get the product built and deployed. Like other parts of the Department of Defense (the Joint Improvised Threat Defeat Agency (JIDA) and the Defense Innovation unit Experimental (DIUX),) NGA’s Outpost Valley team is using a Hacking for Defense sprint to build a scalable process for recruiting industry and other partners to get solutions to real problems deployed at speed.

Putting lean principles into NGA’s acquisition practices
As part of the Department of Defense, the NGA acquires technology and information systems through the traditional DOD’s acquisition system – which has been described as the antitheses of rapid customer discovery and agile practices. The current acquisition system seldom validates whether a promised capability actually works until after the government is locked into a multiyear contract, and fixing those problems later often means cost overruns, late delivery, and under performance. And as any startup will tell you, the traditional government acquisition processes create disincentives for startups to participate in the DOD Market. Few startups know where and how to find opportunities to sell to the DOD, they seldom have the resources or expertise to navigate DOD bureaucratic procurement requirements, and the 12 plus months it takes the government to enter into a contract makes it cost prohibitive for startups.

A year ago Sue Gordon, the deputy director of the NGA, sent out an agency-wide memo that said in part, “…we must build speed and flexibility (agility) into our acquisition processes to respond to those evolutions. It is our job to acquire the technologies, data and services that NGA and the NSG need to execute our mission in the most effective, efficient and timely manner possible …”

In addition to NGA’s internal Lean Innovation process and innovation outpost in Silicon Valley, they are starting to use open innovation and crowdsourcing to attract commercial developers to tackle geospatial intelligence problems.

This week the NGA posted its first major open Challenge – The NGA Disparate Data Challenge– on Challenge.gov, the U.S. government’s open innovation and crowdsourcing competition. Government agencies like the NGA can use the site to post challenges and award prizes to citizens who find the best solutions. Putting a challenge on a crowdsourcing platform is a groundbreaking activity for the agency and opens the possibility for a number of benefits.

Presenting a problem instead of a set of requirements to startups leaves the window open to uncover unknown solutions and insights
Setting up the challenge in two stages hopefully gets startups to participate while learning about the NGA and its technical needs
Asking for working solutions offers the potential for minimal viable acquisition to quickly validate who can solve the problem prior to committing large sums of taxpayer funds
Finding solutions at speed by shrinking the timeline for determining the viability of a solution without the need for executing any large scale contract.

The NGA Disparate Data Challenge has two stages.

Stage 1: teams have to demonstrate access and retrieval to analyze NGA provided datasets. (This data is a proxy for the difficulties associated with accessing and using NGA’s real classified data.) Up to 15 teams who can do this can win $10,000. And the winners get to go Stage 2.
Stage 2: the teams demo their solutions and other features they’ve added against a new data set live to an NGA panel of judges, in hackathon style competition. First place will take an additional $25,000; second $15,000; and third $10,000 with an opportunity to be part of a competitive pool for a future pilot contract with NGA.

NGA’s challenge is its first attempt to attract startups that otherwise would not do business with the agency. It’s likely that the prize amounts ($10-$25K) may be off by at least one order of magnitude to get a startup to take their eye off the commercial market. Curating a crowd and persuading them to work together because the work meets their value proposition is hard work that takes incubation not just prizes. However, this is a learning opportunity and a great beginning for the Department of Defense.

Challenges in Embracing Innovation in Government Agencies
Innovation in large organizations are fraught with challenges including; building an innovation pipeline without screwing up current product development, educating senior leadership and (at times intransigent) middle management about the difference between innovation and execution, encouraging hands-on customer development, establishing links between department and functional silos that don’t talk to each other (and often competing for resources), turning innovative prototypes and minimum viable products into deliverable products to customers, etc.

Government agencies have all these challenges and more. Government agencies have more stringent policies and procedures, federally regulated oversight and compliance rules, and line-item budgets for access to funding. In secure locations, IT security can hinder the simplest process while a lack of access to a physical collaboration space and access to data, all set up additional barriers to innovation.

The NGA has embraced promising moves to bring lean methods to the way they innovate internally and acquire technology. But what we’ve seen in other agencies in the Department of Defense is that unless the innovation process is run by, coached and scaled by innovators who have been in the DOD and understand these rules (and have the clearances), using off-the-shelf commercial lean innovation techniques in government agencies is likely to create demos for senior management but few fully deployed products. (The National Security Agency has pioneered getting this process right with the I-Corps@NSA.)

Lessons Learned

Lean Innovation teams are starting up at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA)

NGA has an Innovation Outpost in Silicon Valley working on it’s first hacking for Defense Sprint

NGA is experimenting with open innovation with its first problem on Challenge.gov

The goal of Lean in government agencies should mean deployment not demos

In order to successfully deliver products with speed and urgency, this requires coaches and instructors who have been the customer: warfighters, analysts, operators, etc.

It will take innovation built from the inside as well as acquisition from the outside to make it happen

Filed under: Customer Development, Hacking For Defense, Science and Industrial Policy | 1 Comment »

Why the Navy Needs Disruption Now (part 2 of 2)

Posted on July 29, 2016 by steve blank

The future is here it’s just distributed unevenly – Silicon Valley view of tech adoption

The threat is here it’s just distributed unevenly – A2/AD and the aircraft carrier

This is the second of a two-part post following my stay on the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson. Part 1 talked about what I saw and learned – the layout of a carrier, how the air crew operates and how the carrier functions in context of the other ships around it (the strike group.) But the biggest learning was the realization that disruption is not just happening to companies, it’s also happening to the Navy. And that the Lean Innovation tools we’ve built to deal with disruption and create continuous innovation for large commercial organizations were equally relevant here.

This post offers a few days’ worth of thinking about what I saw. (If you haven’t, read part 1 first.)

The threat is here; it’s just distributed unevenly – A2/AD and the aircraft carrier
Both of the following statements are true:

The aircraft carrier is viable for another 30 years.
The aircraft carrier is obsolete.

Well-defended targets
Think of an aircraft carrier as a $11 billion dollar portable air force base manned by 5,000 people delivering 44 F/A-18 strike fighters anywhere in the world.

The primary roles of the 44 F/A-18 strike fighters that form the core of the carrier’s air wing is to control the air and drop bombs on enemy targets. For targets over uncontested airspace (Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, etc.) that’s pretty easy. The problem is that First World countries have developed formidable surface-to-air missiles – the Russian S–300 and S-400 and the Chinese HQ-9 – which have become extremely effective at shooting down aircraft. And they have been selling these systems to other countries (Iran, Syria, Egypt, etc.). While the role of an aircraft carrier’s EA-18G Growlers is to jam/confuse the radar of these missiles, the sophistication and range of these surface-to-air missiles have been evolving faster than the jamming countermeasures on the EA-18G Growlers (and the cyber hacks to shut the radars down).

This means that the odds of a carrier-based F/A-18 strike fighter successfully reaching a target defended by these modern surface-to-air missiles is diminishing yearly. Unless the U.S. military can take these air defense systems out with drones, cruise missiles or cyber attack, brave and skilled pilots may not be enough. Given the F/A-18’s are manned aircraft (versus drones), high losses of pilots may be (politically) unacceptable.

Vulnerable carriers
If you want to kill a carrier, first you must find it and then you have to track it. In WWII knowing where the enemy fleet located was a big – and critical – question. Today, photo imaging satellites, satellites that track electronic emissions (radio, radar, etc.) and satellites with synthetic aperture radar that can see through clouds and at night are able to pinpoint the strike group and carrier 24/7. In the 20^th century only the Soviet Union had this capability. Today, China can do this in the Pacific and to a limited extent, Iran has this capability in the Persian Gulf. Soon there will be enough commercial satellite coverage of the Earth using the same sensors, that virtually anyone able to pay for the data will be able to track the ships.

During the Cold War the primary threat to carriers was from the air – from strike/fighters dropping bombs/torpedoes or from cruise missiles (launched from ships and planes). While the Soviets had attack submarines, our anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) capabilities (along with very noisy Soviet subs pre-Walker spy ring) made subs a secondary threat to carriers.

In the 20^th century the war plan for a carrier strike group used its fighter and attack aircraft and Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from the cruisers to destroy enemy radar, surface-to-air missiles, aircraft and communications (including satellite downlinks). As those threats are eliminated, the carrier strike can move closer to land without fear of attack. This allowed the attack aircraft to loiter longer over targets or extend their reach over enemy territory.

Carriers were designed to be most effective launching a high number of sorties (number of flights) from ~225 miles from the target. For example, we can cruise offshore of potential adversaries (Iraq and Syria) who can’t get to our carriers. (Carriers can standoff farther or can reach further inland, but they have to launch F-18’s as refueling tankers to extend the mission range. For example, missions into Afghanistan are 6-8 hours versus normal mission times of 2-3 hours.)

In the 21st century carrier strike groups are confronting better equipped adversaries, and today carriers face multiple threats before they can launch an initial strike. These threats include much quieter submarines, long-range, sea-skimming cruise missiles, and in the Pacific, a potential disruptive game changer – ballistic missiles armed with non-nuclear maneuverable warheads that can hit a carrier deck as it maneuvers at speed (DF-21d and the longer range DF-26).

In the Persian Gulf the carriers face another threat – Fast Inshore Attack Craft (FIAC) and speedboats with anti-ship cruise missiles that can be launched from shore.

The sum of all these threats – to the carrier-based aircraft and the carriers themselves – are called anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capabilities.

Eventually the cost and probability of defending the carrier as a manned aircraft platform becomes untenable in highly defended A2/AD environments like the western Pacific or the Persian Gulf. (This seems to be exactly the problem the manned bomber folks are facing in multiple regions.) But if not a carrier, what will they use to project power? While the carrier might become obsolete, the mission certainly has not.

So how does/should the Navy solve these problems?

Three Horizons of Innovation
One useful way to think about in innovation in the face of increasing disruption / competition is called the “Three Horizons of Innovation.” It suggests that an organization should think about innovation across three categories called “Horizons.”

Horizon 1 activities support executing the existing mission with ever increasing efficiency
Horizon 2 is focused on extending the core mission
Horizon 3 is focused on searching for and creating brand new missions
(see here for background on the Three Horizons.)

Horizon 1 is the Navy’s core mission. Here the Navy executes against a set of known mission requirements (known beneficiaries, known ships and planes, known adversaries, deployment, supply chain, etc.) It uses existing capabilities and has comparatively low risk to get the next improvement out the door.

In a well-run organization like the Navy, innovation and improvement occurs continuously in Horizon 1. Branches of the Navy innovate on new equipment, new tactics, new procurement processes, more sorties on newer carriers, etc. As fighter pilots want more capable manned aircraft and carrier captains want better carriers, it’s not a surprise that Horizon 1 innovations are upgrades – the next generation of carriers – Ford Class; and next generation of navy aircraft – the F-35C. As a failure here can impact the Navy’s current mission, Horizon 1 uses traditional product management tools to minimize risk and assure execution. (And yes, like any complex project they still manage to be over budget and miss their delivery schedule.)

Because failure here is unacceptable, Navy Horizon 1 programs and people are managed by building repeatable and scalable processes, procedures, incentives and promotions to execute and the mission.

In Horizon 2, the Navy extends its core mission. Here it looks for new opportunities within its existing mission (trying new technology on the same platform, using the same technology with new missions, etc.) Horizon 2 uses mostly existing capabilities (the carrier as an aircraft platform, aircraft to deliver munitions) and has moderate risk in building or securing new capabilities to get the product out the door.

An example of potential Naval Horizon 2 innovations is unmanned drones flying off carriers to do the jobs fighter pilots hate such as serving as airborne tankers (who wants to fly a gas tank around for 6 hours?) and ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance), another tedious mission flying around for hours that could be better solved with a drone downlinking ISR data for processing on board a ship.

However, getting the tanker and ISR functions onto drones only delays the inevitable shift to drones for strike, and then for fighters. The problem of strike fighters’ increasing difficulty in penetrating heavily defended targets isn’t going to get better with the new F-35C (the replacement for the F/A-18). In fact, it will get worse. Regardless of the bravery and skill of the pilots, they will face air defense systems evolving at a faster rate than the defensive systems on the aircraft. It’s not at all clear in a low-intensity conflict (think Bosnia or Syria) that civilian leadership will want to risk captured or killed pilots and losing planes like the F-35C that cost several hundred million dollars each.

Management in Horizon 2 works by pattern recognition and experimentation inside the current mission model. Ironically, institutional inertia keeps the Navy from deploying unmanned assets on carriers. In a perfect world, drones in carrier tanker and ISR roles should have been deployed by the beginning of this decade. And by now experience with them on a carrier deck could have led to first, autonomous wingmen and eventually autonomous missions. Instead the system appears to have fallen into the “real men fly planes and command Air Wings and get promoted by others who do” mindset.

The Navy does not lack drone demos and prototypes, but it has failed to deploy Horizon 2 innovations with speed and urgency. Failure to act aggressively here will impact the Navy’s ability to carry out its mission of sea control and power projection. (The Hudson Institute report on the future of the carrier is worth a read, and a RAND report on the same topic comes out in October.)

If you think Horizon 2 innovation is hard in the Navy, wait until you get to Horizon 3. This is where disruption happens. It’s how the aircraft carrier disrupted the battleship. How nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines changed the nature of strategic deterrence, and how the DF-21/26 and artificial islands in the South China sea changed decades of assumptions. And it’s why, in most organizations, innovation dies.

For the Navy, a Horizon 3 conversation would not be about better carriers and aircraft. Instead it would focus on the core reasons the Navy deploys a carrier strike group: to show the flag for deterrence, or to control part of the sea to protect shipping, or to protect a Marine amphibious force, or to project offensive power against any adversary in well-defended areas.

A Horizon 3 solution for the Navy would start with basic need of these missions (sea control, offensive power projection – sortie generation) the logistic requirements that come with them, and the barriers to their success like A2/AD threats. Lots of people have been talking and writing about this and lots of Horizon 3 concepts have been proposed such as Distributed Lethality, Arsenal Ships, underwater drone platforms, etc.

https://youtu.be/21dFaIIeXpU

Focussing on these goals – not building or commanding carriers, or building and flying planes – is really, really hard. It’s hard to get existing operational organizations to think about disruption because it means they have to be thinking about obsoleting a job, function or skill they’ve spent their lives perfecting. It’s hard because any large organization is led by people who succeeded as Horizon 1 and 2 managers and operators (not researchers). Their whole focus, career, incentives, etc. has been about building and make the current platforms work. And the Navy has excelled in doing so.

The problem is that Horizon 3 solutions take different people, different portfolio, different process and different politics.

People: In Horizon 1 and 2 programs people who fail don’t get promoted because in a known process failure to execute is a failure of individual performance. However, applying the same rules to Horizon 3 programs – no failures tolerated – means we’ll have no learning and no disruptive innovations. What spooks leadership is that in Horizon 3 most of the projects will fail. But using Lean Innovation they’ll fail quickly and cheaply.

In Horizon 3 the initial program is run by mavericks – the crazy innovators. In the Navy, these are the people you want to court martial or pass over for promotion for not getting with current program. (In a startup they’d be the founding CEO.) These are the fearless innovators you want to create new and potentially disruptive mission models. Failure to support their potential disruptive talent means it will go elsewhere.

Portfolio: In Horizon 3, the Navy is essentially incubating a startup. And not just one. The Navy needs a portfolio of Horizon 3 bets, for the same reason venture capital and large companies have a portfolio of Horizon 3 bets – most of these bets will fail – but the ones that succeed are game changers.

Process: A critical difference between a Horizon 3 bet and a Horizon 1 or 2 bet is that you don’t build large, expensive, multi-year programs to test radically new concepts (think of the Zumwalt class destroyers). You use “Lean” techniques to build Minimal Viable Products (MVPs). MVPs are whatever it takes to get you the most learning in the shortest period of time.

Horizon 3 groups operate with speed and urgency – the goal is rapid learning. They need to be physically separate from operating divisions in an incubator, or their own facility. And they need their own plans, procedures, policies, incentives and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) different from those in Horizon 1.

The watchwords in Horizon 3 are “If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.”

Politics: In Silicon Valley most startups fail. That’s why we invest in a portfolio of new ideas, not just one. We embrace failure as an integral part of learning. We do so by realizing that in Horizon 3 we are testing hypotheses – a series of unknowns – not executing knowns. Yet failure/learning is a dirty word in the world of promotions and the “gotcha game” of politics. To survive in this environment Horizon 3 leaders must learn how to communicate up/down and sideways that they are not running Horizon 1 and 2 projects.

Meanwhile, Navy and DOD leadership has to invest in, and clearly communicate their innovation strategy across all three Horizons.

Failure to manage innovation across all three Horizons and failure to make a portfolio of Horizon 3 bets means that the Navy is exposed to disruption by new entrants. Entrants unencumbered by decades of success, fueled by their own version of manifest destiny.

Lessons Learned

Our carriers are a work of art run and manned by professionals

Threats that can degrade or negate a carrier strike group exist in multiple areas

However, carriers are still a significant asset in almost all other combat scenarios

Speed and urgency rather than institutional inertia should be the watchwords for Horizon 2 innovation

Horizon 3 innovation is about a clean sheet of paper thinking

It’s what Silicon Valley calls disruption

It requires different people, portfolio, process and politics

The Navy (and DOD) must manage innovation across all three Horizons

Allocating dollars and resources for each

Remembering that todays Horizon 3 crazy idea is tomorrow Horizon 1 platform

Thanks to the crew of the U.S.S. Vinson, and Commander Todd Cimicata and Stanford for a real education about the Navy.

Filed under: Hacking For Defense, Navy, Science and Industrial Policy, Technology | 8 Comments »

Why the Navy Needs Disruption Now (part 1 of 2)

Posted on July 28, 2016 by steve blank

The future is here it’s just distributed unevenly – Silicon Valley view of tech adoption

The threat is here it’s just distributed unevenly – A2/AD and the aircraft carrier

Sitting backwards in a plane with no windows, strapped in a 4-point harness, wearing a life preserver, head encased in a helmet, eyes covered by googles, your brain can’t process the acceleration. As the C-2 A Greyhound is hurled off an aircraft carrier into the air via a catapult, your body thrown forward in the air, until a few seconds later, hundreds of feet above the carrier now at 150 miles per hour you yell, “Holy Shxt.” And no one can hear you through the noise, helmet and ear protectors.

I just spent two days a hundred miles off the coast of Mexico aboard the U.S.S. Carl Vinson landing and taking off on the carrier deck via a small cargo plane.

Taking off and landing is a great metaphor for the carrier. It’s designed to project power – and when needed, violence.

It’s hard to spend time on a carrier and not be impressed with the Navy, and the dedicated people who man the carrier and serve their country. And of course that’s the purpose of the two-day tour. The Navy calls its program Outreach: Americas Navy. Targeting key influencers (who they call Distinguished Visitors,) the Navy hosts 900/year out to carriers off the West Coast and 500/year to carriers on the East Coast. These tours are scheduled when the carriers are offshore training, not when they are deployed on missions. I joined Pete Newell (my fellow instructor in the Hacking for Defense class) and 11 other Stanford faculty from CISAC and the Hoover Institution.

I learned quite a bit about the physical layout of a carrier, how the air crew operates and how the carrier functions in context of the other ships around it (the strike group.) But the biggest learning was the realization that disruption is not just happening to companies, it’s also happening to the Navy. And that the Lean Innovation tools we’ve built to deal with disruption and create continuous innovation for large commercial organizations were equally relevant here.

The Carrier
U.S. aircraft carriers like the Vinson (there are 9 others) are designed to put the equivalent of an Air Force base anywhere on any ocean anywhere in the world. This means the U.S. can show the flag for deterrence (don’t do this or it will be a bad day) or to control some part of the sea (to protect commercial and/or military shipping, or protect a Marine amphibious force – on the way or at a place they will land); and project power (a euphemism for striking targets with bombs and cruise missiles far from home).

On an aircraft carrier there are two groups of people – the crew needed to run the carrier, called the ship’s company, and the people who fly and support the aircraft they carry, called the Air Wing. The Vinson carries ~2,800 people in the ship’s company, ~2,000 in the Air Wing and ~150 staff.

Without the Air Wing the carrier would just be another big cruise ship. The Air Wing has 72 aircraft made up of jet and propeller planes. The core of the Air Wing are the 44 F/A-18 strike fighters.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0vKjewofLU

The F/A-18 strike fighters are designed to do two jobs: gain air superiority by engaging other fighter planes in the air or attack targets on the ground with bombs (that’s why they have the F/A designation). Flying on missions with these strike fighters are specially modified F/A-18’s – EA-18G Growlers that carry electronic warfare jammers which electronically shut down enemy radars and surface-to-air missiles to ensure that the F/A-18s get to the target without being shot down.

Another type of plane on the carrier is the propeller-driven E-2C Hawkeyes, which is an airborne early warning plane. Think of the Hawkeyes as airborne air traffic control. Hawkeyes carry a long-range radar in a dome above the fuselage, and keep the strike group and the fighters constantly aware of incoming air threats. They can send data to the fighters and to other ships in the battle group which identifies the location of potential threats. They can also detect other ships at sea.

The other planes in the carrier’s Air Wing are 16 helicopters: 8 MH-60S Nighthawk helicopters for logistics support, search and rescue and special warfare support; and 8 MH-60R Seahawks to locate and attack submarines and to attack Surface targets. They carry sonobuoys, dipping sonar and anti-submarine torpedoes. And last but not least, there is the plane that got us on the carrier, the C2-A Greyhound – the delivery truck for the carrier.

You’re not alone
Carriers like the Vinson don’t go to sea by themselves. They’re part of a group of ships called the “carrier strike group.” A strike group consists of a carrier, two cruisers with Tomahawk cruise missiles which can attack land targets, and two destroyers and/or frigates with Aegis surface to air missiles to defend the carrier from air attack. (In the past, the strike group was assigned an attack submarine to hunt for subs trying to kill the carrier. Today the attack subs are in such demand they are assigned by national authorities on an as-needed basis.) The strike group also includes replenishment ships that carry spare ammunition, fuel, etc. (The 150 staff on the carrier include separate staff for the strike group, Air Wing, carrier, surface warfare (cruisers with tomahawk missiles) and air defense (Aegis-armed destroyers.)

The strike group also receives antisubmarine intelligence from P-3/P-8 anti-submarine aircraft and towed arrays on the destroyers, and additional situational awareness from imaging, Electronic Intelligence (ELINT) and radar sensors and satellites.

Before our group flew out to the carrier, we were briefed by Vice-Admiral Mike Shoemaker. His job is aviation Type Commander (TYCOM) for all United States Navy naval aviation units (responsible for aircrew training, supply, readiness, etc.) He also wears another hat as the commander of all the Navy planes in the Pacific. It was interesting to hear that the biggest issue in keeping the airplanes ready to fight are sequestration and budget cuts. These cuts have impacted maintenance, and made spare parts hard to get. And no pay raises make it hard to retain qualified people.

Then it was time to climb into our C-2 Greyhound for the flight out to the aircraft carrier. Just like a regular passenger plane, except you put on a life vest, goggles, ear plugs, and over all that a half helmet protecting the top and back of your head while enclosing your ears in large plastic ear muffs. Then you and 25 other passengers load the plane via the rear ramp, sit facing backwards in a plane with no windows and wait to land.

On the U.S.S. Vinson
Landing on an aircraft carrier is an equally violent act. When you make an arrested landing, a tail hook on the plane traps one of the four arresting cables stretched across the deck, and you decelerate from 105 mph to zero in two seconds. When the plane hit the arresting wire on the carrier deck, it came to a dead stop in 250 feet. There was absolutely no doubt that we had landed (and a great lesson on why you were wearing head protection, goggles and strapped into your non-reclining seat with a four-point harness). As the rear ramp lowered, we were assaulted with the visual and audio cacophony of crewmen in seven different colored shirts on the deck swarming on and around F-18s, E2Cs, helicopters, etc., all with their engines running.

Captain Doug Verissimo and his executive officer Captain Eric Anduze, welcomed us to the carrier. (One of my first problems onboard was translating Navy ranks into their Army/Air Force equivalents. For example, a navy captain equals an Air Force/Army Colonel, and a rear admiral is a brigadier general, etc.)

flight deck Then for the next two days the carrier’s public affairs officer led us on the “shock and awe” tour. In four years in the Air Force I had been stationed on four fighter bases, three of them in war zones, some with over 150 planes generating lots of sorties. But I had to grudgingly admit that watching F-18s landing on a 300-foot runway 60 feet above the water, on a pitching deck moving 30 mph at sea – one a minute – at night – was pretty impressive. And having us stand on the deck less than 50 feet away from these planes as they landed trapping the arrestor wires, and launched via a catapult was a testament to the Navy’s PR acumen. Most of crew on the flight deck are in their late teens and maybe early 20s. (And for me, hard to believe 4 decades ago in some other life I was doing that job.) Standing on the deck on a Navy carrier, it’s impossible not to be impressed with the precision choreography of the crew and the skill of their pilots.

Our group climbed the ladders (inclined at a 68-degree angle – there are no stairs) up and down the 18 decks (floors) of the ship. We saw the hangar deck where planes were repaired, the jet engine shop, jet engine test cell, arresting cable engine room, the bridge where they steer the ship, the flag bridge (the command center for the admiral), the flight deck control and launch operations room (where the aircraft handler keeps track of all the aircraft on the flight deck and in the hangar), and the carrier air traffic control center (CATCC).

At each stop an officer or enlisted man gave us an articulate description of what equipment we were looking at and how it fit into the rest of the carrier.

(What got left out of the tour was the combat direction center (CDC), the munitions elevators, ships engines and any of the avionics maintenance shops and of course, the nuclear reactor spaces.)

During lunch and dinners, we had a chance to talk at length to the officers and enlisted men. They were smart, dedicated and proud of what they do, and frank about the obstacles they face getting their jobs done. Interestingly they all echoed Vice-Admiral Shoemaker’s observation that the biggest obstacles they face are political – sequestration and budget cuts.

Just before we left we got a briefing from the head of the Carrier Strike Group, Rear Admiral James T. Loeblein about the threats the carrier and the strike group face.

Then it was off to be catapulted back home.

It’s clear that the public affairs office has a finely tuned PR machine. So if the goal was to impress me that the Navy and carriers are well run and manned – consider it done.

However, it got me thinking… new aircraft carrier’s cost $11 billion. And we have a lot of them on order. Given the threats they are facing are they going to be viable for another 30 years? Or is the aircraft carrier obsolete?

Tomorrow’s post will offer a few days’ worth of thoughts about carriers, strike groups and how the Navy can continue to innovate with carriers and beyond.

Lessons Learned – part 1 of 2

Our carriers are a work of art run and manned by professionals

Lots more in part 2, in the next post…

Thanks to the crew of the U.S.S. Vinson, and Commander Todd Cimicata and Stanford for a real education about the Navy.

Filed under: Hacking For Defense, Navy, Science and Industrial Policy, Technology | 6 Comments »

The Mission Model Canvas – An Adapted Business Model Canvas for Mission-Driven Organizations

Posted on February 23, 2016 by steve blank

As we prepared for the new Hacking for Defense class at Stanford, we had to stop and ask ourselves: How do we use the Business Model Canvas if the primary goal is not to earn money, but to fulfill a mission? In other words, how can we adapt the Business Model Canvas when the metrics of success for an organization is not revenue?

Alexander Osterwalder and I think we have the answer – the new Mission Model Canvas.

Here are our collective thoughts.

—-

The Lean Startup is the way most innovators build startups and innovate inside of existing companies. As a formal method, the Lean Startup consists of three parts:

The Business Model Canvas – to frame hypotheses
Customer Development – to test those hypotheses in front of customers
Agile Engineering – to build Minimum Viable Products to maximize learning

The Business Model Canvas has been a great invention for everyone from startups to large companies. Unlike an org chart, which describes how a company executes to deliver known products to known customers, the Business Model Canvas illustrates the search for the unknowns that most new ventures face. The 9 boxes of the canvas let you visualize all the components needed to turn customer needs/problems into a profitable company.

From Revenue Streams to Mission Achievement
The Business Model Canvas has served all of us well in thinking about building businesses – and therein lies the problem. In a business the aim is to earn more money than you spend. What if you’re a government or a military organization or part of the intelligence community? In these cases you don’t earn money, but you mobilize resources and a budget to solve a particular problem and create value for a set of beneficiaries (customers, support organizations, warfighters, Congress, the country, etc.)

For these organizations, the canvas box labeled Revenue Streams doesn’t make sense. In a mission-driven organization such as the defense and intelligence community, there is no revenue to measure. So the first step in building a canvas for mission-driven organizations is to change the Revenue Stream box in the canvas and come up with a counterpart that would provide a measure of success.

We’re calling this alternative Mission Achievement. Later in this post I’ll explain how we’ll measure and describe Mission Achievement, but first our Mission Model Canvas needs four more tweaks.

Customer Segments is changed to Beneficiaries
Cost Structure is changed to Mission Cost/Budget
Channel is changed to Deployment
Customer Relationships is changed to Buy-in/Support

Mission_Model_Canvas The rest of this blog post explains the how and why of these changes to the canvas.

Customer Segments Change to Beneficiaries
At first glance, when developing a new technology for use in the defense and intelligence community, the customer appears obvious – it’s the ultimate war fighter. They will articulate pains in terms of size, weight, form fit, complexity and durability. But there are other key players involved. Requirement writers and acquisition folks look at systems integration across the battlefield system, while contracting officers, yet another segment, will count beans, measure the degree of competition and assess the quality of market research involved. The support organizations need to worry about maintainability of code or hardware. Does legal need to sign off for cyber operations? So yes, war fighters are one customer segment, but others need to be involved before the war fighter can ever see the product.

So the first insight is that in the defense and intelligence community mission models are always multi-sided markets with the goal of not just building a great demo but getting the product adopted and deployed.

Second, in the defense and intelligence communities almost all of the mission models look like that of an OEM supplier – meaning there are multiple layers of customers in the value chain. Your product/service is just part of someone else’s larger system.

So to differentiate “customers” from the standard business model canvas we’ll call all the different customer segments and the layers in the defense and intelligence value chain beneficiaries.

The Value Proposition Canvas
Of all the nine boxes of the canvas, two important parts of the model are the relationship between the Value Proposition (what you’re building) and the beneficiaries. These two components of the business model are so important we give them their own name, Product/Market Fit.

Because of the complexity of multiple beneficiaries and to get more detail about their gains and pains, Osterwalder added an additional canvas called the Value Proposition Canvas. This functions like a plug-in to the Mission Model Canvas, zooming in to the value proposition to describe the interactions among these beneficiaries, war fighters, etc. and the product/service in more detail. Using the Value Proposition Canvas with the Mission Model Canvas lets you see both the big picture at the mission model level and the detailed picture of each beneficiary at the “product/market fit” level.

Value prop zoom bus model In the defense and intelligence community mission models, there will always be multiple beneficiaries. It’s important that each beneficiary gets its own separate Value Proposition Canvas.

value_proposition_canvas

Distribution Channel changes to Deployment
In the commercial world we ask, “What type of distribution channel (direct sales, app store, system integrator, etc.) do we use to get the product/service from our company to the customer segments?” For the Department of Defense or Intelligence organizations, we ask instead:

“What will it take to deploy the product/service from our current Minimum Viable Product to widespread use among people who need it?” (What architecture components can they innovate on and what can’t they?)
“What constitutes a successful deployment? (number of users, units in the field, time to get it into the field, success in the field, etc.)”
“How do we turn a Horizon 3 innovation into something that gets adopted by a Horizon 1 organization?”

Customer Relationships changes to Buy-In/Support
In an existing business, Customer Relationships is defined as establishing and maintaining a relationship to support existing customers. In a startup we redefined Customer Relationships to answer the question: How does a company get, keep and grow customers?

For the defense and intelligence communities, we have modified Customer Relationships to mean, “For each beneficiary (customer segment), how does the team get “Buy-In” from all the beneficiaries?”

Customer discovery helps you understand whose buy-in is needed in order to deploy the product/service (legal, policy, procurement, etc.) and how to get those beneficiaries to buy-in? (Funding? Mandates? User requested? etc.) In addition, the long-term support and maintenance of new projects need to be articulated, understood and bought-into by the support organizations.

At the Pentagon a favorite way to kill something is to coordinate it to death by requiring buy-in from too many people too early. How to determine who are the small group of critical people to get buy-in from – and how to determine who are the next set required to sustain the iterative development of future MVP’s – is one of the arts of entrepreneurship in the defense and intelligence community.

Revenue Streams changes to Mission Achievement
Mission Achievement is the value you are creating for the sum of all of the beneficiaries / the greater good.

It’s important to distinguish between the value for individual beneficiaries (on the Value Proposition Canvas) and overall Mission Achievement. For example, Mission Achievement could be measured in a variety of ways: the number of refugees housed and fed, the number of soldiers saved from roadside bombs, the number of cyberattacks prevented, the increased target surveillance of sensor fusion, etc. None of these are measured in dollars and cents. Keep in mind, there is only mission achievement if it delivers value to the end beneficiary.

[Update: Watch the Mission Model Canvas Videos]

Introduction to the Mission Model Canvas (2:19)
Mission Model Canvas: Beneficiaries & Stakeholders (2:49)
Mission Model Canvas: Value Proposition (1:33)
Mission Model Canvas: Buy-In (1:35)
Mission Model Canvas: Deployment (1:26)
Mission Model Canvas: Mission Achievement (1:16)
Mission Model Canvas: Key Activities (0:53)
Mission Model Canvas: Key Resources (0:37)
Mission Model Canvas: Partners (0:57)
Mission Model Canvas: Mission Budget (1:17)
Mission Model Canvas: Key Concepts (2:44)

Lessons Learned

In the defense and intelligence community the metrics of success are not revenue but mission achievement

We’ve modified the Business Model Canvas into a Mission Model Canvas

Changed Revenue Streams to Mission Achievement

Changed Customer Segments to Beneficiaries

Changed Cost Structure to Mission Cost/Budget

Changed Channel to Deployment

Changed Customer Relationships to Buy-in/Support

Organizations without specific revenue goals can now use a version of the Business Model Canvas

Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan, Customer Development, Hacking For Defense, Science and Industrial Policy, Teaching | 29 Comments »

Blank’s Rule – To predict the future 1/3 of you need to be crazy

Posted on December 15, 2015 by steve blank

In a rapidly changing world those who copy the past have doomed their future.

When companies or agencies search for disruptive and innovative strategies they often assemble a panel of experts to advise them. Ironically the panel is often made up of people whose ideas about innovation were relevant in the past.

I’ve seen this scenario play out in almost every large company and government agency trying to grapple with disruption and innovation. They gather up all the “brand-name wisdom” in an advisory board, task force, panel, study group, etc. All of these people – insiders and outsiders – have great resumes, fancy titles, and in the past brilliant insights. But unintentionally, by gathering the innovators from the past, the past is what’s being asked for – while it’s the future that’s needed.

You can’t create a blueprint for the future. But we know one thing for sure. The future will be different from the past. A better approach is to look for people who are the contrarians, whose ideas, while they sound crazy, are focused on the future. Most often these are not the safe brand names.

If your gathered advisory board, task force, panel, study group, etc., tasked with predicting the future doesn’t have 1/3 contrarians, all you’re going to do is predict the past.

——-

In the 1950’s and 60’s with the U.S and the Soviet Union engaged in a full-blown propaganda war, the race to put men in space was a race for prestige – and a proxy for the superiority of one system of government over the other.

In 1961 the U.S. was losing the “space race.” The Soviets had just put a man in orbit and their larger rockets allowed them to launch larger payloads and perform more space spectaculars than the U.S. The new President, John Kennedy looked for a goal where the U.S. could beat the Soviet Union. He decided to raise the stakes by declaring that we would land a man on the moon “before the decade is out” (brave talk before we even got someone into orbit.) This meant that NASA had to move quickly to find the best method to accomplish the journey.

NASA had panels of experts arguing about which of two options to use to get to the moon: first they considered, direct ascent; then moved to another idea, Earth-orbit rendezvous (EOR).

Direct ascent was basically the method that had been pictured in science fiction novels and Hollywood movies for a decade. moon rocket A giant rocket would be launched directly to the moon, land and then blast off for home. But there were three problems:

direct ascent was the least efficient way to get to the moon and would require a giant rocket (the Nova) and
the part that landed on the moon would be 65 feet tall (requiring one heck of a ladder to the surface of the moon.)
it wasn’t clear that a rocket this big could be ready by the end of the decade.

So NASA settled on the second option: Earth-orbit rendezvous. Instead of launching a whole rocket to the moon directly, Earth-orbit rendezvous would to launch two pieces of the spacecraft – one at a time – using Saturn rockets that were then in development. These pieces would meet up in earth orbit and send a ship, (still 65 feet tall as in the direct flight mode), to the moon and back to Earth. This idea was also a decade old – it was how they proposed building a space station. The advantage of Earth-orbit rendezvous to go to the moon was that it required a pair of less powerful Saturn rockets that were already under development.

If you can’t see the movie click here

All the smartest people at NASA (Wernher Von Braun, Max Faget,) were in favor of Earth-orbit rendezvous and they convinced NASA leadership this was the way to go.

But one tenacious NASA engineer, John Houbolt believed that we wouldn’t get to the moon by the end of the decade and maybe not at all if we went with Earth-orbit rendezvous.

Houbolt was pushing a truly crazy idea, Lunar-orbit rendezvous (LOR). This plan would launch two spaceships into Earth orbit on top of a single Saturn rocket. Once in Earth orbit, the rocket would fire again, boosting both spacecraft to the moon. Reaching orbit around the moon, two of the crew members would climb into a separate landing ship they carried with them – the lunar excursion module (LEM). The LEM would detach from the mother ship (called the command module), and land on the moon. landers The third crew member would remain alone orbiting the moon in the command module. When the two astronauts were done exploring the moon they would take off using the top half of the LEM, and re-dock with the command module (leaving the landing stage of the LEM on the moon.) The three astronauts in their command ship would head for home.
The benefits of Lunar-orbit rendezvous (LOR) were inescapable.

You’d only need one rocket, already under development, to get to the moon
The part that landed on the moon would only be 14′ tall. Getting down to the surface was easy

Yet in 1961 LOR was a completely insane idea. We hadn’t even put a man into orbit, let alone figured out how to rendezvous and dock in earth orbit and some crazy guy was suggesting we do this around the moon. If it didn’t succeed the astronauts might die orbiting the moon. However, Houbolt wasn’t some crank, he was a member of the Lunar Mission Steering Group studying space rendezvous. Since he was only a mid-level manager he presented his findings to the internal task forces and the experts dismissed this idea the first time they heard it. Then they dismissed it the 2^nd, 5^th and 20^th time. John Houbolt

Houbolt bet his job, went around five levels of NASA management and sent a letter to deputy director of NASA arguing that by insisting on ground rules to only consider direct ascent or earth orbit rendezvous meant that NASA shut down any out-of-box thinking about how to best get to the moon.
Luckily Houbolt got to make his case, and when Wernher Von Braun changed his mind and endorsed this truly insane idea, the rest of NASA followed.

We landed on the moon on July 20^th 1969.

——-

I recently got to watch just such a panel. It was an awesome list of people. Their accomplishments were legendary, heck, every one of them was legendary. They told great stories, had changed industries, invented new innovation platforms, had advised presidents, had won wars, etc. But almost none of them had a new idea about innovation in a decade. Their recommendations were ones you could have written five years ago.

In a static world that would be just fine. But in a corporate world of continuous disruption and in a national security world of continuously evolving asymmetric threats you need to have crazy people being heard.

Or you’ll never get to the moon.

Lessons Learned

Most companies and agencies have their own John Houbolts. But most never get heard. Therefore, “Blank’s rules for an innovation task force”:

1/3 insiders who know the processes and politics

half of those who would provide top cover to non-standard solutions

1/3 outsiders who represent “brand-name wisdom”

They provide cover and historical context

1/6 crazy insiders – the rebels at work

They’ve been trying to be heard

Poll senior and mid-level managers and have them nominate their most innovative/creative rebels

(Be sure they read this before they come to the meeting.)

1/6 crazy outsiders

They’ve had new, unique insights in the last two years

They’re in sync with the crazy insiders and can provide the insiders with “cover”

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Filed under: Corporate/Gov't Innovation, Science and Industrial Policy | 13 Comments »

Innovation Outposts in Silicon Valley – Going to Where the Action Is

Posted on December 1, 2015 by steve blank

This is the second in a series about the changing models of corporate innovation co-authored with Evangelos Simoudis. Evangelos and I are working on what we hope will become a book about the new model for corporate entrepreneurship. Read part one on the Evolution of Corporate R&D.

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Innovation and R&D Outposts
For decades large companies have set up R&D labs outside their corporate headquarters, often in foreign countries, in spite of having a large home market with lots local R&D talent. IBM’s research center in Zurich, GM’s research center in Israel, Toyota in the U.S are examples.

These remote R&D labs offered companies four benefits.

They enabled companies to comply with local government laws – for example to allow foreign subsidiaries to transfer manufacturing technology from the U.S. parent company while providing technical services for foreign customers
They improved their penetration of local and regional markets by adapting their products to the country or region
They helped to globalize their innovation cycle and tap foreign expertise and resources
They let companies develop products to launch in world markets simultaneously

Other companies operating in small markets with little R&D resources in their home country (ABB, Novartis and Hoffmann-La Roche in Switzerland, Philips in the Netherlands and Ericsson in Sweden) pursued R&D outside their home country by necessity.

Internationalization of R&D

source: Market versus technology drive in R&D internationalization: M von Zedtwitz, Oliver Gassmann

Innovation Outposts Are Moving To Innovation Clusters
Today, large companies are taking on a decidedly 21^st-century twist. They are putting Innovation Outposts into Innovation Clusters -in particular Silicon Valley – to tap into the clusters’ innovation ecosystems.

(An Innovation Cluster is a concentration of interconnected companies that both compete and collaborate. Silicon Valley, Herzliya in Israel, Zhongguancun for software and Shenzen for hardware in China are examples of technology clusters, but so was Detroit for cars, Hollywood for movies, Milan for fashion.)

In the last five years, hundreds of large companies have established Innovation Outposts (and here) in Silicon Valley. The charter of these Innovation Outposts is to monitor Silicon Valley for new innovative technologies and/or companies (as emerging threats or potential tools for disruption) and then to take advantage of these innovations by creating new products or investing in startups.

While that’s the theory, the reality is that to date, most of these Innovation Outposts are at best another form of innovation theater – they make a large company feel like they’re innovating, but very few of these outposts change a company’s product direction and fewer impact their bottom line.

Companies who want their investments in Silicon Valley to be more than just press releases need to think through an end-to-end corporate outpost strategy.

This series of posts offers companies the tools to develop an Innovation Outpost strategy:

Determining whether a Corporate Innovation Outpost is necessary
Planning how to establish an Innovation Outpost
Deciding how to expand the Outpost

Sense and Respond

The first objective of an Innovation Outpost is to sense, i.e., look for or monitor the development of potential innovations that:

Can become threats that could lead to the disruption of the corporate parent. For example, American Express’s Silicon Valley Innovation Outpost is monitoring innovations in financial technologies that are created by companies such as Square. Evangelos and I are in the process of developing a tool for diagnosing corporate disruption through innovations pursued by startups.

Would allow the corporation itself to be disruptive by entering adjacent markets to the ones it currently serves or creating and introducing novel and disruptive offerings for new markets. For example, USAA is looking for software innovations that will enable it to introduce Usage-Based Insurance products to disrupt the car insurance market.

The second objective of the corporate Innovation Outpost is to respond to identified threats and potential opportunities. Companies tend to set up their outposts to respond in one of five ways:

Invent: They establish project-specific advanced development efforts like Delphi Automotive’s autonomous car navigation project or broader Horizon 3 basic research efforts that take advantage of, or investigate, technologies and business models the innovation ecosystem is known for in order to create new products and services. For example, Verizon’s Silicon Valley R&D center focuses on big data and software technologies, as well as online advertising-based business models. Sometimes these Horizon 3 research efforts may be associated with a moonshot the corporation would like to pursue as is the case with Google (Google Car), Apple (iPhone) and IBM (Watson).

Invest: They allocate a corporate venture fund that invests in startups working on technology and/or business model innovations of interest. For example, UPS recently invested in Ally Commerce in order to understand the logistics opportunities arising from manufacturers selling directly to consumers rather than through distributors.

Incubate: They support the efforts of very early stage teams and companies that want to develop solutions in areas of interest–for example, Samsung’s incubator focuses on startups working on the Internet of Things—or they experiment with new corporate cultures and work environments –for example, Standard Chartered Bank’s startup studio.

Acquire: Companies buy startups in order to access both the innovations the startups are developing and their employees, and in the process inhibit competitors from getting them. For example, Google acquired several of the robotics startups that had what was considered the best intellectual property.

Partner: Collaborate with startups in order to develop a disruptive new solution using their innovations along with the corporations or to distribute innovative solutions the start up has developed. For example, a few years ago Mercedes partnered with Tesla in batteries for electric vehicles.

After working with over 100 companies, Evangelos and I clearly see that some of these five responses are more effective than others. Moreover, the speed of the response is as important as the ability to respond. Corporations that establish Innovation Outposts often lose on speed, not on their ability to sense. What makes an outpost an effective contributor versus one that’s simply an expense item starts back at corporate headquarters with a company’s overall innovation strategy. So before we talk about the tactics of establishing an outpost, lets think about what types of discussions and decisions should first happen at the “C-level” before anyone leaves the building.

Lessons Learned

Companies are establishing Innovation Outposts in Silicon Valley

They do this to sense and/or respond to technology shifts

Sense means monitor the development of potential innovations that can become threats or would allow the corporation to be disruptive

Respond means, Invent, Invest, Incubate, Acquire or Partner

Most of these Innovation Outposts will become Innovation Theater and fail to add to the company

See Part 1: Innovation Outposts and The Evolution of Corporate R&D, Part 2: Innovation Outposts: Going to Where the Action is, Part 3 of Innovation Outposts, Six Critical Decisions Before Establishing an Innovation Outpost and Part 4 How to Set Up a Corporate Innovation Outpost that Works

Filed under: Corporate/Gov't Innovation, Innovation Outposts, Science and Industrial Policy | 1 Comment »

Innovation Outposts and The Evolution of Corporate R&D

Posted on November 21, 2015 by steve blank

I first met Evangelos Simoudis when he ran IBM’s Business Intelligence Solutions Division and then as CEO of his first startup Customer Analytics. Evangelos has spent the last 15 years as a Venture Capitalist, first at Apax Partners and later at Trident Capital. During the last three years he’s worked with over 100 companies, many of which established Innovation Outposts in Silicon Valley. He’s now helping companies get the most out of their relationships with Silicon Valley.

Evangelos writes extensively about the future of corporate innovation on his blog.

Evangelos and I are working on what we hope will become a book about the new model for corporate entrepreneurship. His insights about how large companies are using the Valley is the core of this series of four co-authored blog posts.

—-

The last 40 years have seen an explosive adoption of new technologies (social media, telecom, life sciences, etc.) and the emergence of new industries, markets and customers. Not only are the number of new technologies and entrants growing, but also increasing is the rate at which technology is disrupting existing companies. As a result, while companies are facing continuous disruption, current corporate organizational strategies and structures have failed to keep pace with the rapid pace of innovation.

This burst of technology innovation and attendant disruption to corporate strategies and organizational structures is nothing new. As Carlota Perez points out, (see Figure 1) technology revolutions happen every half-century or so. According to Perez, there have been five of these technology revolutions in the last 240 years.

carlota perez 5 tech cycles

Figure 1: Five technology revolutions source: Carlota Perez

Perez divides technology revolutions into two periods (Figure 2): The Installation Period and the Deployment Period. In the Installation Period, a great surge of technology development (Perez calls this Irruption) is followed by an explosion of investment (called the Frenzy.) This is followed by a financial crash and then the Deployment period when the technology becomes widely adopted. In between the Installation and Deployment periods lies a turning point called Institutional Adjustment when institutions (companies, society, et al) adjust to the new technologies.

life cycle of tech

Figure 2: The two periods characterizing technology revolutions source: Carlota Perez

Historically during this Institutional Adjustment period companies have to adjust their corporate strategies to deal with these technology shifts. The change in corporate strategy forces a change in the structure of how a company is organized. In the U.S. we’ve gone through three of these structural shifts. We’re now in the middle of the fourth. Lets quickly review them and see what these past shifts can tell us about the future of corporate R&D.

Institutional Adjustments
In the first 50 years of commerce in the then-new United States, most businesses were general merchants, buying and selling all types of products as exporters, wholesaler, importers, etc. By 1840 companies began to specialize in a single type of goods like cotton, wheat or drugs, etc. and concentrated on a single part of the supply chain – importing, distribution, wholesale, retail. This shift from general merchants to specialists was the first structural shift in American commerce.

These specialist companies were still small local businesses. Ownership and management were one and the same – the owners managed, and there were no salaried middle managers or administrators.

In the 1850’s and 60’s, the railroads changed all that. The railroads initially served a region of the country, but very quickly grew into nationwide companies. The last quarter of the 19^th century, what Perez calls the Age of Steel and Heavy Engineering, saw the growth of America’s first national corporations in railroads, steel, telegraph, meatpacking, and industrial equipment. These growing national companies were challenged to figure out how to organize an organization of increased complexity that resulted from their large size, and geographic scale as well as their horizontal and vertical integration. For example, US Steel had integrated vertically and was involved in the mining of the iron ore all the way to the production of various steel products, e.g., nails. These new corporate strategies drove companies to build structures around functions (manufacturing, purchasing, sales, etc.) and to develop professional managers and management hierarchies to run them. Less than 50 years later, by the beginning of the 20^th century, the modern form of the corporation had emerged. (For the best explanation of this see Chandler’s The Visible Hand.) This shift from small businesses to corporations organized by function was the second structural shift in American commerce.

By the 1920’s, in Perez’s Age of the Automobile and Oil, companies once again faced new strategic pressures as physical distances in the United States limited the reach of day-to-day hands-on management. In addition, firms found themselves now managing diverse product lines. In response, another structural shift in corporate organization occurred. In the 1920’s companies moved from monolithic functional organizations (sales, marketing, manufacturing, purchasing, etc.) and reorganized into operating divisions (by product, territory, brand, etc.), each with its own profit and loss responsibility. This strategy-to-structure shift from functional organizations to operating divisions was led by DuPont and popularized by General Motors and quickly followed by Standard Oil and Sears. This was the third structural shift in American commerce.

The 1970’s marked the beginning of our current technology revolution: The Age of Information Technologies, Telecommunications and Biotech. This revolution is not only creating new industries but also affecting existing ones – from retail to manufacturing, and from transportation to financial services. We are now somewhere between the end of Installation and the beginning Deployment – that confusing period between the end of the Frenzy and the beginning of the Turning Point, during which time institutional adjustments are necessary. Existing companies are starting to feel the pressures of new technologies and the massive wave of new entrants fueled by the explosion of investment from a recent form of financing – venture capital. (Venture capital firms, as we know them only date back to the 1970s.) Companies facing continuous disruption need to find new corporate strategies and structures. This fourth structural shift in American commerce is the focus of this series of blog posts. In particular, we are going to focus on how each of these shifts has changed the organization and role of Corporate R&D.

Corporate R&D Evolves With Each New Structural Shift
Each institutional adjustment also changed how companies innovated and built new products. During the Age of Steel and Heavy Engineering in the 1870’s to 1920’s, innovation occurred outside the corporation via independent inventors and small companies. Inventors such as Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and Samuel Colt come to mind. Patents, inventions and small companies were sold to larger corporations. By the 1920’s, in the Age of the Automobile and Oil, large companies sought to control the new product development process. To do so they brought innovation and invention into the company by setting up storied Corporate R&D Labs such as GE Labs, DuPont Labs, Bell Labs, IBM Research, 3M, Xerox PARC, and Kodak Labs. By the 1950’s Shumpeter observed that in-house R&D had replaced the inventor-entrepreneur. The technology cycle was in the Synergy and Maturity phase, and little innovation was happening outside of companies. It was corporate R&D labs that set the pace of innovation in each industry.

Corporate R&D Labs

As the Age of Information Technologies and Telecommunications gained momentum in the 1970’s, the Irruption phase of this new technology cycle created an onslaught of new startups funded by venture capital. Think of companies like Apple, Digital Equipment Corporation, Sun Microsystems and Genentech. The beginning of a new technology cycle didn’t come with a memo or a formal announcement. Corporate R&D and Strategy groups that had been successful for the past 70 years were finding their traditional methods no longer worked.

Historically Corporate Strategy and R&D groups worked hand-in-hand to keep companies competitive. They were adept at analyzing competitors, trends, new technologies and potential disruptors to the corporation’s business. Corporate Strategy would develop plans for new products, and R&D would then create and patent the disruptive innovations. Tasked with “looking over the horizon,” Corporate R&D and Strategy organizations looked at the last technology cycle and the existing incumbents instead of seeing the new technology cycle and the new wave of startups.

Corporate R&D in the Age of the CEO as Chief Execution Officer
Ironically as the new technology cycle went from Irruption to Frenzy (remember Perez’s stages of technology revolutions), existing corporations headed in the other direction. Over the past 15-20 years as startups were funded with ever-increasing waves of investment, companies have cut back their investment in innovation. Corporations focused on financial metrics like Return On Net Assets and Internal Rate of Return to reap the benefits of the last technology cycle. This meant R&D organizations have been pushed to work more on D (development) and less on R (research.) Researchers addressed short-term, Horizon 1 problems (existing business models, last technology cycle) rather than working on potentially disruptive Horizon 3 ideas from the next technology cycle. (See here for background on horizons.)

As a result, corporate R&D organizations have been producing sustaining innovations that protect and prolong the life of existing business models and their products and revenue streams. While this optimizes short-term Return On Net Assets and Internal Rate of Return, it destroys long-term innovation and investment in the next technology cycle.

While that’s the good news for short to mid-term revenue growth, the bad news is that corporate R&D’s is investing much less on disruptive new ideas and the next technology cycle and instead focusing on the development of incremental technologies. The result is a brain-drain of researchers who want to do the next big thing. Corporate researchers are voting with their feet, leaving to join startups or to start companies themselves, further hampering corporate innovation efforts. Ironically as the general pace of innovation accelerates outside companies, internal R&D organizations no longer have the capability to disrupt or anticipate disruptions.

Because of declining corporate investment in disruptive research and business model innovation, the typical corporate R&D organization can’t:

Keep up with technology innovations: Even corporations with high R&D spending are concluding that their existing R&D model cannot keep pace with exponential technologies and the accelerating pace of information technologies, biotechnologies, and materials
Address the global creation of innovation: Disruptive innovation is now created around the world by companies of any size, many of them startups. These companies are funded by abundant capital from institutional venture investors, private investors, and other sources. Our hyperconnected world is amplifying the effects of these companies and enabling them to have global impact, as seen with companies from Israel, India, China, and Brazil
Properly align technology with other types of innovation: Corporate R&D remains focused on technology innovation. Certainly these organizations have little, or no, ability to appreciate and create other forms of innovation

By the 1990’s corporate innovation strategies changed to a focus on startups—investing in, partnering with or buying them. Companies built corporate venture capital and business development groups.

But by 2010, this technology cycle moved into the Frenzy phase of innovation investment. Corporate R&D Labs could not keep up with the pace of external invention. Increasingly corporate venture capital involved too long of a lead-time for corporate technology investments to pay off.

To adapt to the current frenetic pace of innovation, corporations have created a new organizational structure called the Innovation Outpost. They are placing these outposts at the center of the source of innovation: startup ecosystems.

Be sure to check out about the future of corporate innovation on Evangelos Simoudis blog.

Filed under: Corporate/Gov't Innovation, Innovation Outposts, Science and Industrial Policy | 5 Comments »

Hacking For Defense In Silicon Valley

Posted on March 31, 2015 by steve blank

Lead, follow or get the heck out of the way

In peacetime the U.S. military is an immovable and inflexible bureaucracy. In wartime it can adapt and adopt organizational change with startling speed.

BMNT, a new Silicon Valley company, is combining the Lean Methods it learned in combat with the technology expertise and speed of startups.

—–

But first some history…

World War II
In World War II the U.S. government reengineered its approach to building weapons. In a major break from the past, where the military designed all its own weapons, 10,000 scientists and engineers from academia worked in civilian-run weapons labs (most headquartered in universities) in an organization called the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD).

OSRD was tasked to develop military weapons systems and solve military problems but had wide autonomy to determine how to accomplish its tasks and organize its labs. (The weapons were then manufactured in volume by U.S. corporations.)

The OSRD developed advanced electronics: radar, electronic warfare, rockets, sonar, proximity fuse, Napalm, the Bazooka and new drugs such as penicillin and cures for malaria. One OSRD project – the Manhattan Project – the development of the atomic bomb – was so secret and important that it was spun off as a separate program. The University of California managed research and development of the bomb design at Los Alamos while the US Army managed the Los Alamos facilities and the overall administration of the project.

After the war the U.S. split up the functions of the OSRD. Nuclear weapons went to the new Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), basic weapons systems research went to the Department of Defense (DOD) and all U.S. biomedical and health research went back to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In 1950, government support of basic science research in U.S. universities became the charter of the National Science Foundation (NSF). Each of these independent research organizations would support a mix of basic and applied research.

The Cold War
During the Cold War the U.S. and the Soviet Union faced off with a nuclear deterrence policy called mutually assured destruction (aptly named MAD.) But to fight a conventional war in Europe, Soviet forces had built a 3 to 1 advantage in tanks, artillery, armored personnel carriers, and soldiers. In response the U.S. developed a new strategy in the late 1970’s to counter the Warsaw Pact. Instead of matching the U.S.S.R. tank for tank or solider to solider, the U.S. saw that it could change the game and take advantage of a lead we had that was getting longer every day – using our computer and chip technology to aggressively build a new generation of weapons that the Soviet Union could not.

At the heart of this “offset strategy” was “precision strike,” – building stealth aircraft to deliver precision guided munitions unseen by enemy radar, and designing intelligence and reconnaissance systems that would target for them. The offset strategy was smart weapons, smart sensors, and stealth using silicon chips, electronics and computers that only the U.S. could design and produce.

By the mid-1980’s the Soviet military was struggling to keep up with this “revolution in military affairs. The announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) further destabilized the Soviet Union.

The Gulf Wars
When I first started teaching customer development (searching, validating and executing a business model), one of my students pointed out that customer development was similar to the theory of a military strategist, John Boyd. In the 1960’s, Boyd, who was a fighter pilot, proposed that instead of executing a fixed plan, wars would be won by those who can Observe, Orient, Decide and Act (the OODA Loop.) After being ignored for decades, Boyd’s OODA Loop drove the U.S. war fighting strategy in both Gulf Wars. The OODA Loop was the Lean Startup philosophy before lean.

Iraq, Afghanistan and the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force (REF)
In Afghanistan in 2002 U.S. soldiers were tasked to clear caves that the Taliban used to store equipment. Many of the caves still had Taliban fighters inside while others had been booby-trapped. To clear the caves soldiers threw grappling hooks inside then pulled the hooks out to catch trip-wires and explode bombs. But often this technique did not work and soldiers died. The Army realized they needed to do something more effective. They gave the problem to Colonel Bruce Jette, and 90 days and $750,000 later he had bypassed the existing Army acquisition system and bought existing robots from companies. Exponent provided the PackBot and the Marcbot and deployed them to the field.

From that day the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force (REF) was born.

The REF’s goal is to deliver technology solutions to front-line soldiers in days and weeks, instead of months and years either by using solutions from previous REF efforts or existing government- or commercial-off-the-shelf technologies purchased with a government credit card.

The REF had permission to shortcut the detailed 100+ page requirements documents used by the defense acquisition process. It developed a ten-line short form that listed the most important parts of the requirement. The REF also had its own budget, which it could use to acquire equipment.

Soon the REF was sending teams of civilian and military subject matter experts out into the field to discover what they needed. REF expanded its operations to include forward teams in Kuwait and Iraq to provide technology to fill capability gaps and to counter the highest priority threats.

By the end of 2007, the REF had delivered more than 550 types of equipment and more than 75,000 individual items. The average time from receiving a request from the field to delivering a solution to the soldiers was 111 days.

In 2010 Colonel Peter Newell took over the REF and turned its focus into what we would call a Lean Startup.
Newell insisted that REF started with a deep understanding of soldiers’ problems  before purchasing a proposed solution. Newell found that four problems accounted for two-thirds of REF requirements:

defeating roadside bombs
supporting soldiers on foot with communications and load carrying devices
providing soldiers with timely intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance in combat
supplying and protecting small isolated combat outposts

He came up with his version of the OODA loop to explain to people how REF should behave.

To get closer to his customers, Newell commissioned three mobile laboratories that were airlifted to forward operating bases. These labs included a Computer Numerical Control milling machine and 3-D printers for rapid prototyping. REF Mobile Lab

Hacking For Defense (H4D)
When Colonel Peter Newell left the Army, he came to Silicon Valley at the urging of a friend and fellow retired Army Colonel, Joe Felter, a Stanford PhD who moved to Palo Alto and Stanford after a career in the Special Forces. Newell accepted Felter’s invitation to join a company he had originally established. BMNT does for the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community what the REF did for the U.S. Army – build teams that deliver solutions to complex problems, with access to the entire network of suppliers and partners that Newell and Felter developed throughout their careers.

To tap into the innovation of Silicon Valley, BMNT, in collaboration with Stanford’s Preventive Defense Project organized Hacking For Defense (H4D) – a series of hackathons – to help the Department of Defense do four things:

Identify new ideas that will solve problems the military expects to see in the future
Map those ideas to the technology that could be used to solve them
Recruit the people who can make it happen
Show the DoD how to engage Silicon Valley with challenging problems and build networks of people to solve them

BMNT‘s first hackathon, “Hacking the Supply Chain,” brought together diverse teams of technologists and users to provide solutions to the questions: How do you supply troops which can be sent on short-notice, for long periods to places where there are no existing bases or supplies? How might we create the most resilient and efficient supply chain possible for our forward-deployed land forces in 2025?

“Hacking the Supply Chain” is focused on:

energy and power generation
potable water and field expedient sewage systems
advanced manufacturing and repair maintenance technologies
training and readiness technologies
command, control, computers, and communications technologies

In mid-April, the ideas generated at BMNT‘s first hackathon will be presented to a panel of experienced senior entrepreneurs, engineers, and military and government officials and then sent to the Department of Defense with specific recommendations on the technologies with potential to support them.

Ultimately Newell and Felter say they want to use BMNT to create an “insurgency” in Silicon Valley to get cutting-edge innovation into the organizations defending our country. (Click here for information on Hacking for Defense events.)

Hacking the Prime’s
In reality, what BMNT is trying to fix is the way the Department of Defense acquires radically new technology and ideas. While DARPA tries to fill that need, today the primary conduits for bringing new technology to the government are the prime contractors (e.g., Lockheed, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, L3, General Dynamics, et al.) But most of these contractors focus on fulfilling existing technology needs that can be profitable.

If a startup wants to provide new technology to the Department of Defense (DoD), they have to sell through the prime contractors who own the relationships with the DoD. Most startups and innovative companies are unwilling to risk exposing their Intellectual Property and go through the paperwork of dealing with the government, so they choose not to pursue government ventures. In this way, the primes artificially restrict DoD’s technological funnel. (Palantir is the most visible Silicon Valley insurgent in this space.)

Today, incentives for bringing innovation into the government with speed and urgency are not aligned with the government acquisition, budgeting, and requirements process. As a result, the DoD fails to acquire truly innovative technologies (much less paradigm-changing technologies) in a timely fashion.

Lessons Learned

In peacetime the U.S. military is an immovable and inflexible bureaucracy

In wartime it can adapt and adopt organizational change with startling speed

The Rapid Equipping Force operated with speed and urgency to deliver solutions to real customer problems

BMNT and Hacking for Defense are trying to bring this same process to Silicon Valley

Filed under: Customer Development, Science and Industrial Policy | 20 Comments »

I-Corps at the NIH: Evidence-based Translational Medicine

Posted on December 17, 2014 by steve blank

If you’ve received this post in an email the embedded videos and powerpoint are best viewed on www.steveblank.com

We have learned a remarkable process that allow us to be highly focused, and we have learned a tool of trade we can now repeat. This has been of tremendous value to us.

Andrew Norris, Principal Investigator BCN Biosciences

Over the last three years the National Science Foundation I-Corps has taught over 700 teams of scientists how to commercialize their technology and how to fail less, increasing their odds for commercial success.

To see if this same curriculum would work for therapeutics, diagnostics, medical devices and digital health, we taught 26 teams at UCSF a life science version of the NSF curriculum. 110 researchers and clinicians, and Principal Investigators got out of the lab and hospital, and talked to 2,355 customers. (Details here)

For the last 10 weeks 19 teams in therapeutics, diagnostics and medical devices from the National Institutes of Health (from four of the largest institutes; NCI, NHBLI, NINDS, and NCATS) have gone through the I-Corps at NIH.

87 researchers and clinicians spoke to 2,120 customers, tested 695 hypotheses and pivoted 215 times. Every team spoke to over 100 customers.

Three Big Questions
The NIH teams weren’t just teams with ideas, they were fully formed companies with CEO’s and Principal Investigators who already had received a $150,000 grant from the NIH. With that SBIR-Phase 1 funding the teams were trying to establish the technical merit, feasibility, and commercial potential of their technology. Many will apply for a Phase II grant of up to $1 million to continue their R&D efforts.

Going into the class we had three questions:

Could companies who were already pursuing a business model be convinced to revisit their key commercialization hypotheses – and iterate and pivot if needed?
Was getting the Principal Investigators and CEO out of the building more effective than the traditional NIH model of bringing in outside consultants to do commercialization planning?
Would our style of being relentlessly direct with senior scientists, who hadn’t had their work questioned in this fashion since their PhD orals, work with the NIH teams?

Evidence-based Translational Medicine
We’ve learned that information from 100 customers is just at the edge of having sufficient data to validate/invalidate a company’s business model hypotheses. As for whether you can/should push scientists past their comfort zone, the evidence is clear – there is no other program that gets teams anywhere close to talking to 100 customers. The reason? For entrepreneurs to get out of the building at this speed and scale is an unnatural act. It’s hard, there are lots of other demands on their time, etc. But we push and cajole hard, (our phrase is we’re relentlessly direct,) knowing that while they might find it uncomfortable the first three days of the class, they come out thanking us.

The experience is demanding but time and again we have seen I-Corps teams transform their business assumptions. This direct interaction with potential users and customers is essential to commercialize science (whether to license the technology or launch a startup.) This process can’t be outsourced. These teams saved years and millions of dollars for themselves, the NIH and the U.S. taxpayer. Evidence is now in-hand that with I-Corps@NIH the NIH has the most effective program for commercializing science.

Lessons Learned Day
Every week of this 10 week class, teams present a summary of what they learned from their customers interviews. For the final presentation each team created a two minute video about their 10-week journey and a 8-minute PowerPoint presentation to tell us where they started, what they learned, how they learned it, and where they’re going. This “Lessons Learned” presentation is much different than a traditional demo day. It gives us a sense of the learning, velocity and trajectory of the teams, rather than a demo day showing us how smart they are at a single point in time.

BCN Biosciences
This video from team BCN Biosciences describes what the intensity, urgency, velocity and trajectory of an I-Corps team felt like. Like a startup it’s relentless.

BCN is developing a drug that increases anti-cancer effect of radiation in lung cancer (and/or reduces normal tissue damage by at least 40%). They were certain their customers were Radiation Oncologists, that MOA data was needed, that they needed to have Phase 1 trial data to license their product, and needed >$5 million and 6 years. After 10 weeks and 100 interviews, they learned that these hypotheses were wrong.

If you can’t see the BCN Biosciences video click here

The I-Corps experience helped the BCN Bioscience team develop an entirely new set set of business model hypotheses – this time validated by customers and partners. The “money slides” for BCN Biosciences are slides 22 and 23.

If you can’t see the BCN Biosciences presentation click here

You Can’t Outsource Customer Discovery
What we hear time and again from the Principal Investigators is “I never would have known this” or “I wouldn’t have understood it if I hadn’t heard it myself.” Up until now the NIH model of commercialization treated a Principal Investigator as someone who can’t be bothered to get out of the building (let alone insist that it’s part of their job in commercialization.) In the 21^st century using proxies to get out of the building is like using barbers as surgeons.

Clinacuity
While the Clinacuity video sounds like an ad for customer discovery, listen to what they said then look at their slides. This team really learned outside the building.

If you can’t see the Clinacuity video click here

Clinacuity’s technology automatically extracts data in real-time from clinical notes, (the narrative text documents in a Electronic Health Record,) and provides a summary in real time. Their diagrams of the healthcare customer segment in slides 15-18 were outstanding.

If you can’t see the Clinacuity presentation click here

GigaGen
The GigaGen team – making recombinant gamma globulin – holds the record for customer discovery – 163 customer interviews on multiple continents.

If you can’t see the GigaGen video click here

GigaGen’s learning on customer value proposition and who were the real stakeholders was a revelation. Their next-to-last slide on Activities, Resouces and Partners put the pieces together.

If you can’t see the GigaGen presentation click here

Affinity Therapeutics
Affinity came into class with a drug coated Arterial Venous Graft – graft narrowing is a big problem.

One of things we tell all the teams is that we’re not going to critique their clinical or biological hypotheses. Yet we know that by getting out of the building their interaction with customers might do just that. That’s what happened to Affinity.

If you can’t see the Affinity video click here

Affinity was a great example of a team that pivoted their MVP. They realized they might have a completely new product – Vascular wraps that can reduce graft infection. See slides 17-23.

If you can’t see the Affinity presentation click here

Haro
Haro is making a drug for the treatment of high risk neuroblastoma, the most common extracranial cancer in infancy and childhood. On day 1 of the class I told the team, “Your presentation is different from the others – and not in a good way.” That’s not how I described them in the final presentation.

If you can’t see the Haro video click here

After 120 interviews the Haro found that there are oncology organizations (NCI-funded clinical development partners) that will take Haro’s compound and develop it at their own expense and take it all the way into the clinic. This will save Haro tens of millions of dollars in development cost. See slides 12 and 13.

If you can’t see the Haro presentation click here

Cardiax
Caridax is developing a neural stimulator to treat atrial fibrillation. Their video points out some of the common pitfalls in customer discovery. Great summary from Mark Bates, the Principal Investigator: “You don’t know what you don’t know. Scientific discovery is different than innovation. You as a prospective entrepreneur need this type of systematic vetting and analysis to know the difference.”

If you can’t see the Cardiax video click here

After 80 interviews they realized they were jumping to conclusions and imparting their bias into the process. Take a look at slides 8-11 and see their course correction.

If you can’t see the Cardiax presentation click here

The other 15 presentations were equally impressive. Each and every team stood up and delivered. And in ways that surprised themselves.

The Lean Startup approach (hypotheses testing outside the building,) was the first time clinicians and researchers understood that talking to customers didn’t require sales, marketing or an MBA – that they themselves could do a pretty good first pass. I-Corps at NIH just gave us more evidence that’s true.

The team videos and slides are on SlideShare here.

A Team Effort
This blog post may make it sound like there was no one else in the room but me and the teams. But nothing could be farther from the truth. The I-Corps@NIH teaching team was led by Edmund Pendleton. Allan May/Jonathan Fay taught medical devices, John Blaho/Bob Storey taught diagnostics and Karl Handelsman/Keith McGreggor taught therapeutics. Andre Marquis, Frank Rimalovski and Dean Chang provided additional expertise. Brandy Nagel was our tireless teaching assistant. Jerry Engel is the NSF I-Corps faculty director.

Special thanks to Paul Yock of Stanford Biodesign and Alexander Osterwalder for flying across the country/world to be part of the teaching team.

I created the I-Corps/Lean LaunchPad® syllabus/curriculum, and with guidance from Allan May, Karl Handelsman Abhas Gupta and Todd Morrill adapted it for Life Sciences/Health Care/Digital Health. The team from VentureWell provided the logistical support. The I-Corps program is run by the National Science Foundation (Babu Dasgupta, Don Millard and Anita LaSalle.) And of course none of this would be possible without the tremendous and enthusiastic support and encouragement of Michael Weingarten the director of the NIH/NCI SBIR program and his team.

Lessons Learned

The I-Corps/Lean LaunchPad curriculum works for therapeutics, diagnostics and device teams

Talking to 100 customers not only affected teams’ commercial hypotheses but also their biological and clinical assumptions

These teams saved years and millions of dollars for themselves, the NIH and the U.S. taxpayer

Evidence is now in-hand that the NIH has the most effective program for commercializing science

In the 21^st century using proxies to get out of the building is like using barbers as surgeons

Filed under: Customer Development, Investment Readiness Level, Lean LaunchPad, Life Sciences (NIH), NIH (National Institutes of Health), Science and Industrial Policy, Teaching | 2 Comments »

Engineering a Regional Tech Cluster-part 3 of 3 of Bigger in Bend

Posted on January 24, 2014 by steve blank

Dino Vendetti a VC at Bay Partners, moved up to Bend, Oregon on a mission to engineer Bend into a regional technology cluster. Over the years Dino and I brainstormed about how Lean entrepreneurship would affect regional development.

I visited Bend last year and caught up with his progress.

Today with every city, state, country trying to build out a technology cluster, following Dino’s progress can provide others with a roadmap of what’s worked and didn’t.

Part 1: Bend, Oregon Ecosystem and Entrepreneurs
Part 2: Early-stage Regional Venture Funds
Part 3: Engineering a Regional Tech Cluster

Here’s Part 3 of Dino’s story…

—
As a transplanted Silicon Valley VC and now a regional investor, I often get asked, “How do we go about building up our local tech ecosystem?”

The short answer is, “One step at a time.”

In the beginning in Bend, “necessity was the mother of invention.” Local entrepreneurs just made it up as they went. But today we are intentionally engineering six distinct activities to support this tech cluster: entrepreneurial density, university, transportation, capital, accelerator, and business community.

Let’s look at each of these six elements in more detail and I’ll explain what we have been doing in Bend to accelerate each of these.

1. Entrepreneurial Density:
Density – the connection of like-minded firms and their support services – is a critical component of a cluster. The most fertile source of entrepreneurs is the population of existing entrepreneurial companies. But for clusters without sufficient firms you first need to attract companies to your region. However, it’s difficult to create density overnight. Entrepreneurs need to understand and believe the reasons why they should want to cluster in your region given there are other alternatives (nationally Silicon Valley or New York; regionally Seattle and Bellevue, Portland and Bend).

In addition to technical and entrepreneurial talent, a region also needs experienced executive talent with industry appropriate backgrounds and personal networks. The goal of this talent is to help mentor startups as they scale and navigate the myriad of issues they will face in growing their business.

Bend’s economic development agency (EDCO) and city leaders (Visit Bend, City of Bend) get it – and have started communicating that Bend welcomes and is friendly to entrepreneurs and startups. Word is spreading and there are lots of people up and down the West Coast who know of and have been to Bend. But it’s easy to get drowned out by the noise from Silicon Valley and other cities in Washington and Oregon. That means that in regional communities like Bend, everyone needs to turn up the volume to consistently sing praises that will not only put the community on the map but also ensure it doesn’t slip.

2. University
Almost every successful tech cluster has a local technical university. This provides a source of technical talent, research, etc. It’s extremely difficult to import enough talent to fuel a rapidly growing tech cluster, so a university is critical to organically generate and retain talent within the region. In particular it’s critical to offer technical degrees that train the talent pool needed to drive the local tech cluster

OSU-Cascades is a new four-year university in Bend that is beginning the build out of its new campus in Bend and offer computer science and user design courses. This effort was over a decade in the making and something that the local community fought hard for.

3. Transportation
Direct flights to the San Francisco Bay Area and other major metro areas (depending on location of the region) are vital to reduce the friction of conducting business, encourage talent to test drive your community, and attract investors and other ecosystem partners to the region.

Bend’s economic development agency (EDCO) has worked very hard to establish direct flights to major West Coast cities including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, and Denver. At times this required rallying local business leaders to make advance purchases of flights to ensure enough passenger volume for the airlines.

4. Local Early-Stage Risk Capital
Early stage venture funds are more important than your mother. If this doesn’t exist your regional cluster is dead-on-arrival. Organize risk-capital in the form of angel funds or venture funds, particularly at the early stage where the largest capital gap exists. This should be a strategic initiative within your state to close the capital gap with in-region capital sources.

Bend is now home to Seven Peaks Ventures and Cascade Angels, both born over the past year in response to the opportunity in the region. The state of Oregon is also making funds available to invest in and support the formation of venture funds within the state.

Bend Venture Conference Winner

5. Local Entrepreneurial Community Entrepreneurial-driven Events
The local entrepreneurial community has been active in running Startup Weekends, launching the FoundersPad accelerator, running hackathons and Ruby on Rails conferences (Ruby on Ales), building out shared tech space, offering incentives (The Big Bend Theory) for startups to relocate to Bend from the Valley, and building up the state’s largest tech/venture conference, the Bend Venture Conference which is now going on its 11^th year. There are many more efforts underway to build upon what has worked and continue the process of evolving and learning.

6. Business Community Support
One of the most difficult things to do is technically the easiest – a dispassionate self-assessment to understand what assets your community has and what you lack.

First, what is your value proposition to a family or business to locate in your region? Recognize that a big part of your job is to remove friction, drive awareness, and amplify the efforts of your local entrepreneurs. Successful entrepreneurs attract other entrepreneurs, so it’s vital to kick start the cycle.

Next, identify your goal. Is it creating a job works program? Stopping brain drain in the region? Attracting and building some key core competency in the region? Ideally your existing talent base and ecosystem naturally support the “core competency magnet” you want to develop.

Finally, put your money where your mouth is – help fund the events and programs in the early years. Once the tech cluster forms, these activities will become self-funding. The ROI won’t be obvious for some early on, but will pay dividends in time.

Regional Cluster Ecosystem

Summary: Bend Is a Global Entrepreneurship Experiment
There are about 25,000 economic development agencies in regional markets across the U.S., all trying to expand the number of businesses that create products and services sold outside their region. These regional businesses create primary jobs that lead to the creation of local secondary jobs.

The Bend experiment is a model to consciously engineer an entrepreneurial cluster in a regional market to spur economic development and job creation.

In the past most regional growth strategies have focused on attracting established companies looking to expand or open a new plant. While it may be strategic for the region to recruit some of these established businesses, those deals usually involve huge tax subsidies and typically create a small finite number of jobs. What isn’t part of most regional growth plans is the organic growth of an entrepreneurial tech cluster in the region. If successful, sewing the seeds of entrepreneurship can lead to a more rapid and sustainable job growth for the region.

By engineering a regional tech cluster, we can impact the trajectory of growth in the region and:

Slow and even reverse the historical migration of tech talent and capital out of the region/state
Locally grow successful tech companies to become amazing primary job creators
Recycle the wealth that is created by re-investing in the region versus transferring wealth to Silicon Valley
Help local successful entrepreneurial and technical talent stay local – by creating their next startup in the region versus emigrating to Silicon Valley
Create a more diversified and healthy economic base that includes tech entrepreneurs

The democratization of entrepreneurship has created a huge opportunity for any region with the right characteristics to create its own sustainable tech cluster. But, as with any true democracy, it won’t happen without the combined participation of the community and desire of entrepreneurs to lead the movement. This is happening in Bend, and I look forward to hearing from others about your own experiments.

Lessons Learned:

Regional tech clusters can be engineered if …

the region has key attributes and a focused effort from the entrepreneurial and business community

Opportunity exists for economic development in regions where tech clusters can be formed

potential to dramatically increase the growth of entrepreneurship and job creation in the region.

Entrepreneurs are the path to job creation and growth…

attract them, reduce the friction to growth, and do everything possible to cause the wealth created to recycle locally

Listen to the blog post here [audio http://traffic.libsyn.com/albedrio/steveblank_hplewis_140124_FULL.mp3]

Download the podcast here

Filed under: Customer Development, Lean LaunchPad, Science and Industrial Policy, Venture Capital | 5 Comments »

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Innovation Outposts and The Evolution of Corporate R&D

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