I just spent a month and a half at Imperial College London co-teaching a “Wicked” Entrepreneurship class. In this case Wicked doesn’t mean morally evil, but refers to really complex problems, ones with multiple moving parts, where the solution isn’t obvious. (Understanding and solving homelessness, disinformation, climate change mitigation or an insurgency are examples of wicked problems. Companies also face Wicked problems. In contrast, designing AI-driven enterprise software or building dating apps are comparatively simple problems.)
I’ve known Professor Cristobal Garcia since 2010 when he hosted my first visit to Catholic University in Santiago of Chile and to southern Patagonia. Now at Imperial College Business School and Co-Founder of the Wicked Acceleration Labs, Cristobal and I wondered if we could combine the tenets of Lean (get out of the building, build MVPs, run experiments, move with speed and urgency) with the expanded toolset developed by researchers who work on Wicked problems and Systems’ Thinking.
Our goal was to see if we could get students to stop admiring problems and work rapidly on solving them. As Wicked and Lean seem to be mutually exclusive, this was a pretty audacious undertaking.
This five-week class was going to be our MVP.
Here’s what happened.
Finding The Problems Professor Garcia scoured the world to find eight Wicked/complex problems for students to work on. He presented to organizations in the Netherlands, Chile, Spain, the UK (Ministry of Defense and the BBC), and aerospace companies. The end result was a truly ambitious, unique, and international set of curated Wicked problems.
Increasing security and prosperity amid the Mapuche conflict in Araucania region of Chile
We held an info session explaining the problems and the unique parts of the class. We were going to share with them a “Swiss Army Knife” of traditional tools to understand Wicked/Complex problems, but they were not going to research these problems in the library. Instead, using the elements of Lean methodology, they were going to get out of the building and observe the problems first-hand. And instead of passively observing them, they were going to build and test MVPs. All in six weeks.
50 students signed up to work on the eight problems with different degrees of “wickedness”.
Imperial Wicked Problems and Systems Thinking – 2023 Class
The Class The pedagogy of the class (our teaching methods and the learning activities) were similar to all the Lean/I-Corps and Hacking for Defense classes we’ve previously taught. This meant the class was team-based, Lean-driven (hypothesis testing/business model/customer development/agile engineering) and experiential – where the students, rather than being presented with all of the essential information, must discover that information rapidly for themselves.
The teams were going to get out of the building and talk to 10 stakeholder a week. Then weekly each team will present 1) here’s what we thought, 2) here’s what we did, 3) here’s what we learned, 4) here’s what we’re going to do during this week.
More Tools The key difference between this class and previous Lean/I-Corps and Hacking for Defense classes was that Wicked problems required more than just a business model or mission model to grasp the problem and map the solution. Here, to get a handle on the complexity of their problem the students needed a suite of tools – Stakeholder Maps, Systems Maps, Assumptions Mapping, Experimentation Menus, Unintended Consequences Map, and finally Dr. Garcia’s derivative of the Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas – the Wicked Canvas – which added the concept of unintended consequences and the “sub-problems” according to the different stakeholders’ perspectives to the traditional canvas.
During the class the teaching team offered explanations of each tool, but the teams got a firmer grasp on Wicked tools from a guest lecture by Professor Terry Irwin, Director of the Transition Design Institute at Carnegie Mellon (see her presentation here.) Throughout the class teams had the flexibility to select the tools they felt appropriate to rapidly gain an holistic understanding and yet to develop a minimum viable product to address and experiment with each of the wicked problems.
Class Flow Week 1
What is a simple idea? What are big ideas and Impact Hypotheses?
Characteristics of each. Rewards, CEO, team, complexity, end point, etc.
What is unique about Wicked Problems?
Beyond TAM and SAM (“back of the napkin”) for Wicked Problems
You need Big Ideas to tackle Wicked Problems: but who does it?
Startups vs. Large Companies vs. Governments
Innovation at Speed for Horizon 1, 2 and 3 (Managing the Portfolio across Horizons)
What is Systems Thinking?
How to map stakeholders and systems’ dynamics?
Customer & Stakeholder Discovery: getting outside the building, city and country: why and how?
Mapping the Problem(s), Stakeholders and Systems – Wicked Tools
Week 2
Teams present for 6 min and receive 4 mins feedback
The Wicked Swiss Army Knife for the week: Mapping Assumptions Matrix, unintended consequences and how to run and design experiments
Prof Erkko Autio (ICBS and Wicked Labs) on AI Ecosystems and Prof Peter Palensky (TU Delft) on Smart Grids, Decarbornization and Green Hydrogen
Lecture on Minimal Viable Products (MVPs) and Experiments
Homework: getting outside the building & the country to run experiments
Assumption Mapping and Experimentation Type – Wicked Tools
Week 3
Teams present in 6 min and receive 4 mins feedback
The Wicked Swiss Army Knife for the week: from problem to solution via “How Might We…” Builder and further initial solution experimentation
On Canvases: What, Why and How
The Wicked Canvas
Next Steps and Homework: continue running experiments with MVPs and start validating your business/mission/wicked canvas
The Wicked Canvas – Wicked Tools
Experimentation Design and How We Might… – Wicked Tools
Week 4
Teams present in 6 min and receive 5 mins feedback
Wicked Business Models – validating all building blocks
The Geography of Innovation – the milieu, creative cities & prosperous regions
How World War II and the UK Started Silicon Valley
The Wicked Swiss Tool- maps for acupuncture in the territory
Storytelling & Pitching
Homework: Validated MVP & Lessons learned
Acupuncture Map for Regional System Intervention – Wicked Tools
Week 5
Teams presented their Final Lessons Learned journey – Validated MVP, Insights & Hindsight (see the presentations at the end of the post.)
What did we understand about the problem on day 1?
What do we now understand?
How did we get here?
What solutions would we propose now?
What did we learn?
Reflections on the Wicked Tools
Results To be honest, I wasn’t sure what to expect. We pushed the students way past what they have done in other classes. In spite of what we said in the info session and syllabus, many students were in shock when they realized that they couldn’t take the class by just showing up, and heard in no uncertain terms that no stakeholder/customer interviews in week 1 was unacceptable.
Yet, everyone got the message pretty quickly. The team working on theMapuche conflict in the Araucania region of Chile, flew to Chile from London, interviewed multiple stakeholders and were back in time for next week’s class. The team working to turn the Basque Country in Spain into an AI hub did the same – they flew to Bilbao and interviewed several stakeholders. The team working on the Green Hydrogen got connected to the Rotterdam ecosystem and key stakeholders in the Port, energy incumbents, VCs and Tech Universities. The team working on Ukraine did not fly there for obvious reasons. The rest of the teams spread out across the UK – all of them furiously mapping stakeholders, assumptions, systems, etc., while proposing minimal viable solutions. By the end of the class it was a whirlwind of activity as students not only presented their progress but saw that of their peers. No one wanted to be left behind. They all moved with speed and alacrity.
Lessons Learned
Our conclusion? While this class is not a substitute for a years-long deep analysis of Wicked/complex problems it gave students:
a practical hands-on introduction to tools to map, sense, understand and potentially solve Wicked Problems
the confidence and tools to stop admiring problems and work on solving them
I think we’ll teach it again.
Team final presentations
The team’s final lessons learned presentations were pretty extraordinary, only matched by their post-class comments. Take a look below.
Join Jerry Engel, Pete Newell, and Steve Weinstein for the sixth edition of the Lean Innovation Educators Summit December 14, 1-4 pm Eastern Time, 10 am-1 pm Pacific Time. Register here.
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This virtual gathering will bring together entrepreneurship educators from around the world who are putting Lean Innovation to work in their classrooms, accelerators, venture studios, and student-driven ventures.
The summit topic is “Education and Innovation in the Age of Chaos and Disruption.”
Our students will be facing the challenges of a world that’s rapidly changing, chaotic and uncertain. A world undergoing climate change, supply chain disruptions, political instability and continual technology innovation and disruption. It’s incumbent on us as educators to provide the next generation of innovators with the tools and mindset to meet these challenges.
Among the questions we’ll address in this short summit:
How do we as entrepreneurship and innovation educators best prepare the next generation?
What role should our institutions help us do this?
What are the other systems and partnerships that we need to take advantage of?
We will have concurrent breakout sessions so participants have the opportunity to choose their own path to explore. We’ll then going to pivot to hear from colleagues across three broad categories of innovation:
Curriculum – We’ll discuss how best to equip educators with the tools they need to cultivate and guide student teams around solving mission-driven problems.
Ecosystems – We’ll explore partnerships that engage and inform positive student engagement and outcomes and how to support diversity of thought, background.
Trends – The rate of technological disruption shows no sign of slowing down. Climate change was a hypothesis for our generation but will be the facts on the ground for our students. The struggle between great powers and a fluid global landscape will accelerate. All of these will shape what future curriculums our students need and educators must deliver.
Alexander Osterwalder, the creator of the business model canvas and Strategyzer co-founder will join the discussion about the intersection of education, innovation and entrepreneurship
During the breakout sessions, you will have the opportunity to contribute to the conversation via Chat, Q&A, and an online community bulletin board. We will close out the Summit with Alex Osterwalder’s fireside chat moderated by Dr. Jerry Engel.
How to register
When you register, you will receive a link to an online collaboration space where you can submit questions, challenges and feedback. This feedback will inform the content of the presentations, post-event white papers, and the curriculum delivered to our educator community.
This session is free but limited to Innovation educators. Register here and learn more on our website: We look forward to gathering as a community of educators to shape the future of Lean Innovation Education.
We just completed the fourth week of our new national security class at Stanford – Technology, Innovation and Great Power Competition. Joe Felter, Raj Shah and I designed the class to cover how technology will shape all the elements of national power (America’s influence and footprint on the world stage).
In class 1, we learned that national power is the combination of a country’s diplomacy (soft power and alliances), information/intelligence, military power, economic strength, finance, intelligence, and law enforcement. This “whole of government approach” is known by the acronym DIME-FIL. And after two decades focused on counter terrorism, the U.S. is now engaged in great power competition with both China and Russia.
The third class focused on Russia, which is asserting itself as a great power challenger. We learned how Russia pursues security and economic interests in parallel with its ideological aims. At times, these objectives complement each other. At other times they clash, Putin’s desire to restore Russia into a great power once again leads to a foreign policy that is opposite the interests of the Russia people. As Putin himself has said, “The collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century,” and that quote offers a window to his worldview as he tries to remake Russia into a great power once again.”
Having covered the elements of national power (DIME-FIL) and China and Russia, the class now shifts to the impact commercial technologies have on DIME-FIL. Today’s topic – Semiconductors.
Optional Rebecca S. Lowen, Creating the Cold War University [Great book if you want to learn more about Stanford’s military-industrial complex origins. Not required for class.]
Pick one of the below questions and answer in approximately 100 words, based on the required readings. Please note that this assignment will be graded and count towards course participation.
Describe the roles of Fred Terman, William Shockley, and Fairchild Semiconductor in the genesis of Silicon Valley. Who had a greater role in creating Silicon Valley, Fred Terman or the Traitorous Eight?
How would you characterize China’s attempt to catch-up in the semiconductor industry? Do you think China can credibly catch TSMC (without an invasion of Taiwan)? Why or why not?
Discussion Questions
Put yourself in the shoes of Mark Liu, chairman of TSMC: Do you view China as more of a competitor or customer – and why?
Now imagine you are the NSC Senior Director with responsibility for technology strategy. What’s the first thing the U.S. Gov’t should do regarding semiconductors?
Class 4: Guest Speaker Our guest speaker for our fourth class was John Hurley, former Member of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, an expert on semiconductors and supply chains, and former Captain, U.S. Army.
Slide 4. The critical role of semiconductors in great power competition. Both our commercial and military systems are dependent on semiconductors. China spends more on semiconductor imports than it does on oil. We framed the advances in technology as part of the 4th industrial revolution. Slides 5-7. We reminded the students of the role the DoD and IC played at Stanford turning it into an outward-facing university, which kick-started technology entrepreneurship here in Silicon Valley.
Slides 9-11 Dual-use technology. For the first time in 75 years, federal labs and our prime contractors are no longer leading innovation in many critical technologies including AI, machine learning, autonomy, biotech, commercial access to space, etc. Rapid advances in these areas are now happening via commercial firms – many in China. This is a radical change in where advanced technology comes from. In the U.S., the government is painfully learning how to reorient its requirements and acquisition process to buy these commercial, off-the-shelf technologies. (Products that are sold commercially and to the DoD are called “dual-use.”)
Slide 15. Semiconductor industry. We began a deep dive into semiconductors by drawing the map of the semiconductor industry (Slides 3-15 from this required reading.) Five companies provide the majority of the wafer fab equipment needed to make chips. TSMC is the leading fab for manufacturing logic chips. (Slides 32-33 from this required reading.) Of the 29 new fabs starting construction in 2021-22, over half are in China and Taiwan.
Slide 16. TSMC Case. We took the class through the TSMC case study and mapped out the roles and interests of TSMC, China, Intel, and the U.S. Slides 17-18. We discussed China’s drive for semiconductor independence, U.S. export controls on Huawei (why and its consequences,) the various constituencies of a U.S. semiconductor policy (Commerce Department, DoD, U.S. chip makers, U.S. semi equipment suppliers, etc.), whether TSMC’s success makes Taiwan more or less secure, given China’s goals of reunification with Taiwan.
Slide 19-20. Policy. How do decision makers formulate policy? Does it start by asking “What problem do we want to solve?” Using semiconductors as an example, is it China’s access to U.S. technology? Or is it China embedding this advanced U.S.-designed technology into their military systems? Or what happens to TSMC and Western access to advanced technology if China quarantines or invades Taiwan?
How do policy makers select and narrow a problem? Is it based on the value the policy adds for identified stakeholders? Is it a personal passion/interest? Specifically for China and semiconductors, what are potential solution ideas? Export controls? Stronger CFIUS regulations? How do you take into account stakeholder feedback (DoD, Commerce Department, commercial firms)? And once you create a policy, how do you effectively implement it?
Slide 21 -23. Class midterm assignment: Assume you’re a policy maker. Write a 2,000-word policy memo that describes how a U.S. competitor is using a specific technology (semiconductors, AI, autonomy, cyber, etc.) to counter U.S. interests. Propose how the U.S. should respond.
Slides 25- 32 Group Projects. We had several teams talk about their learnings from their out-of-the building interviews. Team ShortCircuit (Slide 29) is working on how the U.S. should improve its ability to design and produce semiconductors, and develop and retain relevant talent. They heard from a professor that the ratio of Stanford students taking software versus hardware courses was 10-to-1 software, a complete reversal from decades ago. We discussed whether 1) that was true or just anecdotal 2) if true, was it the same in other research universities, 3) why it happened (software startups are getting funded at obscene valuations)? 4) and what kind of incentives and policies would be needed to change that, and 5) where in the value chain those might be most effective (students, venture capitalists, government, etc.)
We just had our third week of our new national security class at Stanford – Technology, Innovation and Great Power Competition. Joe Felter, Raj Shah and I designed the class to cover how technology will shape all the elements of national power (our influence and footprint on the world stage).
In class 1, we learned that national power is the combination of a country’s diplomacy (soft power and alliances), information/intelligence, its military, economic strength, finance, intelligence, and law enforcement. This “whole of government approach” is known by the acronym DIME-FIL. And after two decades focused on counter terrorism the U.S. is engaged in great power competition with both China and Russia.
In class 2, we learned how China is using all elements of national power: diplomacy (soft power, alliances, coercion), information/intelligence (using its economic leverage over Hollywood, controlling the Covid narrative), its military might and economic strength (Belt and Road Initiative,) to exploit Western finance and technology. This has resulted in Western democracies prioritizing economic cooperation and trade with China above all else. China’s goal is to challenge and overturn the U.S.-led liberal international order and replace it with a neo-totalitarian model.
Going forward, coexistence with China will involve competition but also cooperation. But it’s going to take the demonstrated resolve of the U.S. and its allies to continue to uphold a rules-based order where nations share a vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific where the sovereignty of all countries are respected.
Catch up with the class by reading our intro to the class, and summaries of Class 1 and Class 2.
All which leads to today’s topic, the other great power – Russia.
Pick one of the below questions and answer in approximately 100 words, based on the required readings. Please note that this assignment will be graded and count towards course participation.
Compare and contrast the viewpoints of John Mearsheimer and Michael McFaul on drivers of Russian foreign policy. Where do they agree? Disagree? Which perspective do you agree with more and why?
Evaluate the perspectives of Artyom Lukin and Chris Miller on Russia’s so-called pivot to Asia. Do you agree with one more than the other? Do you believe that the pivot is more a rhetorical or substantive strategic move on the part of Moscow?
Class Discussion Questions:
What are Russia’s geopolitical interests, goals, and/or objectives? From Moscow’s perspective, what are the main obstacles standing in the way of achieving its national goals?
To what degree is Vladimir Putin a unitary actor? How much is he the system of government versus the product of a system?
How does Moscow view the existing, American-led rules-based international order?
What role, if any, does ideology play in Moscow’s strategy?
In what ways are Moscow’s goals compatible and/or incompatible with U.S. national interests?
In what domains does the competition between the United States and the Russian Federation play out? How do these domains interact with one another? Is cooperation between the two possible and beneficial?
How would you characterize the Sino-Russian relationship? In what dimensions is the relationship the strongest? Where are its fault lines? Is the relationship enduring or transient?
Class 3: Guest Speaker
Our guest speaker for our third class was Mike McFaul, the former U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation and former National Security Council Senior Director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs. Mike wrote about his experience as ambassador in From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia. At Stanford, Mike is the Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies,Stanford’s research institute for international affairs, and the home for this class and the Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation.
Ambassador McFaul pointed out that at times Russia pursues security and economic interests in parallel to ideological aims. At times, these objectives complement each other. At other times, they clash. He posited it’s because Russian policy is run by Putin and his political institutions. Slide 7
We then reviewed highlights from the assigned readings. John Mearsheimer’s article took the contrarian position that the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis in Crimea. Slide 8.
Slides 10-12 led the conversation about the end of the Cold War & Collapse of the USSR. George Kennan was the author of the 1946 Long Telegram which set in motion the policy of “containment” of the Soviet Union. He lived to see its collapse a half-century later, and wrote, “I find it hard to think of any event more strange and startling, and at first glance more inexplicable, than the sudden and total disintegration and disappearance…of the great power known successively as the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union.” Stephen Kotkin maintains that if the Soviet elite had so chosen, they could have sustained the Soviet Union decades longer. Perhaps the most enduring quote is from Vladimir Putin himself, “the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century,” as he tries to remake Russia into a great power once again.
Slide 13, Dmitri Trenin from the Carnegie Center points out that the 2014 Ukrainian crisis was the Rubicon. Russia broke a quarter century of cooperative relations among great powers pivoting away from the west, starting a new era of intense competition. Slide 14, Mike McFaul has a more nuanced view. “For a complete understanding of Russian foreign policy.., individuals, ideas, and institutions—President Vladimir Putin, Putinism, and autocracy—must be added to the analysis. (The).. three cases of recent Russian intervention (in Ukraine in 2014, Syria in 2015, and the United States election in 2016) illuminate the causal influence of these domestic determinants in the making of Russian foreign policy.
Slide 15, Russia’s pivot to China.
China-Russian relations are now at their highest point since the mid-1950s, being drawn to each other by the most elementary law of international politics: that of the balance of power. Slide 16 Russia has long struggled to overcome the constraints imposed by the country’s chronic inability to retain talent in support of homegrown innovation and R&D.
North Korea/Iran/Non-Nation States We also covered the two regional threats to international security – North Korea and Iran – as well as the continued threats of terrorism from non-nation states (Al-Qaeda’s, ISIS).
Slides 20-22. North Korea has robust and expanding nuclear weapons program with 10-40 nuclear weapons. Their ballistic missile program not only threatens their neighbors, but their development of long-range ICBMs puts the entire continental United States in range of their nuclear weapons.
Slides 23-25 the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) has actively pursued nuclear weapons and long range ballistic missiles. Under the Iran Nuclear Deal (JCOPA) they had agreed to limit their uranium to 3.67% enrichment. They broke out of the deal in 2019. Today, their uranium enrichment has reached 60% enrichment (90% is weapons grade). Iran has been a major source of regional destabilization, hostage-taking, and sponsorship of terrorism: Ansar Allah (Houthis) in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas/PIJ in Palestine, numerous Shia militias in Iraq (Kataib Hezbollah, Asaib Ahl al Haq, Badr Organization). Iran’s long-running conflict with Israel is a perennial potential flashpoint for a broader conflict in the region. Iran has been actively using cyber attacks and has attacked and harassed commercial shipping and Freedom of Navigation Operations in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.
Slides 26-27 Non-nation states haven’t gone away. They are a persistent, survivable threat unconstrained by traditional geopolitical checks (irrational actor). They are capable of regional and international terror attacks. Some are actively pursuing acquisition of weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical, biological). Addressing the problem through counterinsurgency/ counter terrorism operations, runs the risk of long-term engagements that damage other national objectives and, sometimes, the national interest. Yet, if left unaddressed, these insurgencies can spread globally and create second- and third-order challenges (al-Shabab, Boko Haram, Abu Sayyaf).
Slides 28-31 covered the Group Project. The class has formed into 7 teams – slides 32-38. We suggested they get out of the building to first deeply understand the problem they’ve selected.
We offered a series of questions they may want to ask:
Slide 33. Who has this problem? Why does the problem exist? Consequence of the problem? When do they need a solution? How does this get deployed/delivered? How are they solving it today? How do you know you solved the problem?
Slide 34. Next, after they validate the problem: What would a minimum viable product look like? Who would build and deliver the final product/service? How to you create an “Innovation Insurgency” around the idea? Who would have to get excited about the MVP to fund it? Who are the saboteurs?
Next week we start talking about the impact of commercial technology on Great Power Competition. First up – semiconductors.
Lessons Learned
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. and the Russia Federation had a two-decade long cooperative relationship
In 2014 with the Russian-Ukrainian war and Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and in 2015 with Russian intervention in the Syrian civil war, Russia’s interests and the West’s have radically diverged
Mike McFaul makes the case that Putin, Putinism, and the Russian autocracy are key determinants of their foreign policy
This week, student teams will start getting out of the building to build reflexes and skills to deeply understand a problem
By gathering first-hand information to validate that the problem they are solving is the real problem, not a symptom of something else
Then, students will begin rapidly building minimal viable solutions as a way to test and validate their understanding of both the problem and what it would take to solve it
We just had our second week of our new national security class at Stanford – Technology, Innovation and Great Power Competition. Joe Felter, Raj Shah and I designed the class to cover how technology will shape all the elements of national power (our influence and footprint on the world stage).
A key focus of the class is the return of Great Power competition. This isn’t an issue of which nation comes in first, it’s about what the world-order will look like for the rest of the century and beyond. Will it be a rules-based order where states cooperate to pursue a shared vision for a free and open region and where the sovereignty of all countries large and small is protected under international law? Or will an alternative vision for an autocratic and dystopian future be coerced and imposed by revisionist powers set on disrupting the U.S. led international order- an order that has brought the world unprecedented peace and prosperity since the end of the Second World War?
Xi Jinping, “Uphold and Develop Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” (speech delivered on January 5, 2013, published in Qiushi (“Seeking Truth”), the Central Party School’s main theoretical journal, under Xi’s name on April 1, 2019, and translated in Palladium Magazine in May 2019).
[Kristof wrote this OpEd on the same day of Xi’s speech (above), which was kept secret by the Chinese Communist Party until it was published in April 2019. Read these two documents side-by-side.]
Central Committee of the Communist Party of China’s General Office, “Communique on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere” (aka ‘Document #9’) ChinaFile, April 22, 2013 (translated by ChinaFile and published November 8, 2013)
Pick one of the below questions and answer in approximately 100 words, based on the required readings.
To what degree does the People’s Republic of China have an overarching grand strategy, according to the readings? Do you agree or disagree with the arguments of the readings and why? Even if China does have a grand strategy, is it possible for China to maintain coherent, consistent execution of its strategy? Why or why not?
What are the CCP’s objectives regarding the international system? What instruments of national power does the CCP employ to achieve which specific impacts in order to achieve its objectives?
Class 2- Discussion Questions
What is the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) trying to achieve? What are its goals and objectives? What is Xi Jinping trying to achieve? To what extent are Xi’s goals congruent with the broader CCP’s goals?
How does the CCP and/or Xi view the existing international system?
From the CCP’s perspective, what are the main obstacles standing in the way of achieving the goal of “National Rejuvenation”?
What role does ideology play in the CCP’s strategy?
In what ways are the CCP’s goals compatible and/or incompatible with U.S. national interests?
In what domains does the competition between the United States and the People’s Republic of China play out? How do these domains interact with one another?
Class 2- Guest Speakers
Our speakers for our second class were Matt Pottinger and Matt Turpin.
Matt Pottinger, was a former Deputy National Security Advisor and former National Security Council Senior Director for Asia. As a former Marine, Matt had 3 combat deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Prior to joining the Marine Corps, Matt was a reporter in China, first at Reuters, then at the Wall Street Journal.
Matt Turpin, was a former National Security Council Director for China and the Senior Advisor on China to U.S. Secretary of Commerce. Before entering the White House, Turpin served over 22 years in the U.S. Army. Among other Indo-Pacific focused roles, he served as a China advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon and assisted the Deputy Secretary of Defense with the Defense Innovation Initiative, examining the role of innovation in U.S. defense policy.
Slides 7-10 are selected quotes from our assigned reading. Our lecture and discussion (slides 11-16) took us through the evolution of the hopes the U.S. had for its four-decade-long strategy of diplomatic and economic engagement with China. The hope was that helping China grow its economy would lead to liberalization of its government and greater freedoms for its people. Deng Xiaoping said China needed to “hide our capabilities, bide our time.” Over time, Xi has moved China to a more overt and aggressive phase, no longer hiding its intention to challenge the West. As we discovered, China’s agenda always had been radically different than ours. The growing realization over the last five years is that our hopes for China to democratize as it developed economically were terribly naïve. What we’ve come to realize is that China has been playing a decades-long game to challenge and overturn the U.S.-led liberal international order and replace it with a neo-totalitarian model.
Realizing this, four years ago the U.S. reoriented from a focus on counter terrorism to a new emphasis on great power competition with Russia and China. This new effort can be seen in the Interim U.S. National Security Strategy (which outlines the major U.S. national security concerns and how we plan to deal with them) and 2018 National Defense Strategy (which identifies the priorities and capabilities required by the warfighters to implement the National Security Strategy).
Relevant to this course, China is using all elements of national power: diplomacy (soft power, alliances, coercion), information/intelligence (using its economic leverage over Hollywood, controlling the Covid narrative), its military might and economic strength (Belt and Road Initiative.) China has exploited western finance and technology, and has successfully convinced Western democracies to prioritize economic cooperation and trade with China above all else.
At home, China’s use of digital authoritarianism (facial recognition, biometrics, and social credit) has turned its own country into a surveillance dystopia to ensure that there are no internal challenges to the supremacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The CCP’s oppression of the Uyghurs – a Muslim minority in the western province of Xinjiang – is considered a genocide by many as well as a harbinger of what a Chinese world order will look like.
Going forward, coexistence with China will involve competition but also cooperation. But it’s going to take the demonstrated resolve of the U.S. and its allies to continue to uphold a rules-based order where nations share a vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific where the sovereignty of all countries are respected.
Slides 18-20 dug a bit deeper about why and how of the group project. Students formed teams to work on one of the Great Power Competition issues at the intersection of commercial technologies (AI, machine learning, autonomy, biotech, cyber, commercial access to space, et al.) and DIME-FIL (Diplomatic, Information, Military and Economic, Finance, Intelligence and Law Enforcement.)
Given who our students are, we assume they can all go online and to the library and write a great research paper. As we pointed out to them, while you can be the smartest person in the building, it’s unlikely that 1) that all the facts are in the building, 2) you’re smarter than the collective intelligence sitting outside the building.
Our teaching assistants (who previously took our Hacking for Defense class) shared with the students their own journey of what happens to early assumptions and how solutions evolve when you get out of the building.
If you can’t see the Project Agrippa slides click here.
We want our students to build the reflexes and skills to deeply understand a problem by gathering first-hand information and validate that the problem they are solving is the real problem, not a symptom of something else. Then, students will begin rapidly building minimal viable solutions (policy, software, hardware …) as a way to test and validate their understanding of both the problem and what it would take to solve it.
And they thought we were just going to have great lectures.
The U.S. hoped that helping China grow its economy would lead to liberalization of its government and greater freedoms for its people
We were terribly naïve
China has been playing a decades-long game to challenge and overturn the U.S.-led liberal order and replace it with a neo-totalitarian model
Students will collaborate on teams to first understand and then work to solve national security challenges at the intersection of DIME-FIL and dual-use technology
We just had our first week of our new national security class at Stanford – Technology, Innovation and Great Power Competition. Joe Felter, Raj Shah and I designed the class to cover how technology will shape all the elements of national power (our influence and footprint on the world stage).
National power is the combination of a country’s diplomacy (soft power and alliances), information/intelligence and its military and economic strength. The instruments of national power brought to bear in this “whole of government approach” were long known by the acronym DIME (Diplomatic, Information, Military and Economic) and in recent years have expanded to include “FIL”- finance, intelligence and law enforcement-or DIME-FIL.
Last year, the class focused exclusively on the impact of new technology on the military. Given the broadened scope this year, we’ve tweaked the course content and title to Technology, Innovation and Great Power Competition to better reflect the “whole of government” approach necessary for long-term strategic competition.
The course is cross listed with Stanford’s Masters in International Policy program and the Management Science and Engineering department. The students joining this fight come from a diverse range of disciplines at Stanford including computer science, political science, business, law, public policy, economics, and engineering. If the past is a prologue, they’ll go off to senior roles in defense, foreign policy and to the companies building new disruptive technologies. Our goals are to help them understand the complexity and urgency of the issues, offer them a model to understand the obstacles and path forward, and to inspire them to help lead how the U.S. leverages all instruments of national power to meet 21st century challenges.
In this year’s class, we want to:
Help our students understand how each component of our national security and instruments of national power are now inexorably intertwined with commercial technology. We will explore the complexity and urgency of the impact of the 21st century onslaught of commercial technologies (AI, machine learning, autonomy, biotech, cyber, commercial access to space, et al.) in all parts of the government — from State to the Department of Defense to Treasury and many more.
Give them hands-on experience on how to deeply understand a problem at the intersection of DIME-FIL and dual-use technology. First by developing hypotheses about the problem; next by getting out of the classroom and talking to relevant stakeholders across government, industry, and academia to validate their assumptions; and finally taking what they learned to propose and prototype solutions to these problems.
Is great power competition an accurate way to describe the U.S. relationship with China? With Russia? Is doing so productive for U.S. interests? Why or why not?
What are the risks of casting the US relationship with China and/or Russia as a whole-of-government competition? What are the risks of not viewing these relations as competitive?
Class 1 – Guest Speaker
Our speaker for our first class was former Secretary of Defense General Jim Mattis who gave an inspiring talk about strategy, the Department of Defense’s pivot to great power competition that he led during his tenure as Secretary, and the importance and rewards of service to the nation. General Mattis joined the Marine Corps in 1969, and he has led Marines and then later joint forces at every level from platoon commander as a Lieutenant all the way up to combatant commander of US Central Command as a four-star general. He recently led our entire US Defense Department as our country’s 26th Secretary of Defense. We’re fortunate to now have him back here at Stanford at the Hoover Institution.
After introducing the teaching team and class logistics (slides 1-13) we briefly overviewed the quarter (slide 17)
We set up the class with a discussion of the return of great power competition. This isn’t an issue of which nation comes in first, it’s about what the world-order will look like for the rest of the century and beyond. Will it be a rules-based order where states cooperate to pursue a shared vision for a free and open region and where the sovereignty of all countries large and small is protected under international law? Or will an alternative vision for an autocratic and dystopian future be coerced and imposed by revisionist powers set on disrupting the U.S. led international order – an order that has brought the world unprecedented peace and prosperity since the end of the Second World War? Slide 19.
And then we discussed the pivot in the U.S. National Security Strategy (which outlines the major national security concerns of the United States and how the U.S. plans to deal with them) and 2018 National Defense Strategy (which identifies the priorities and capabilities required by the warfighters to implement the National Security Strategy.)
These documents reoriented the U.S. from its focus on counter terrorism to great power competition with Russia and China (Slides 23-27). Slides 34-38 expanded on the three lines of effort in the National Defense Strategy: 1) Build a Lethal Force, 2) Strengthen Alliances and Build New Partnerships, 3) Reform the Defense Department. Slides 41-42 summarized the competing visions of the U.S. and China. The Biden Administration’s Interim National Security Guidance was introduced which emphasizes continuity in its assessment of the challenges posed by China and Russia and the anticipated enduring era of great power competition. (the White House is now referring to the approach toward China as “strategic competition” rather than Great Power Competition. (The White House is now referring to the approach toward China as “strategic competition” rather than Great Power Competition.)
Slides 45-55 introduced seven instruments of national power and the concept of DIME-FIL. We discussed that the national power of a country (its influence and footprint on the world stage) is more than just its military strength. It’s the combination of a country’s diplomacy (soft power and alliances,) information, and its military, economic, financial, intelligence and law enforcement strength. (This concept is known by its acronym, DIME-FIL.) We pointed out that in many of these areas we’re no longer the leader (the DoD has a polite euphemism for this – “we’re overmatched” – meaning second place.)
Slides 57 and 58 reminded the students that this class is not just about the reading and lectures. 50% of their grade is a group project at the intersection of DIME-FIL and dual-use technologies (AI/ML, quantum, semiconductors, access to space, cyber, biotech, et al.)
For 25 years as the sole Superpower, the U.S. neglected strategic threats from China and a rearmed Russia. The country, our elected officials, and our military committed to a decades-long battle to ensure that terrorists like those that executed the 9/11 attacks are not able to attack us on that scale again. Meanwhile, our country’s legacy weapons systems have too many entrenched and interlocking interests (Congress, lobbyists, DOD/contractor revolving door, service promotion of executors versus innovators) that inhibit radical change. Our economic and foreign policy officials didn’t notice the four-alarm fire as we first gutted our manufacturing infrastructure and sent it to China (profits are better when you outsource); then passively stood by as our intellectual property was being siphoned off; and had no answer to China’s web of trade deals (China’s Belt and Road). The 2018 National Defense Strategy became a wakeup call for our nation.
National power is ephemeral. Nations decline when they lose allies, decline in economic power (the UK in the 20th Century); they lose interest in global affairs (China in the 15th Century); internal/civil conflicts (Russia in the 20th Century); a nations military can miss disruptive technology transitions and new operational concepts. One can make the case that all of these have/or are happening to the United States.
Joe Felter, Raj Shah and I are about to start our second year of teaching what was our Technology, Innovation and Modern War class. (See all the class sessions here.) The goal of last year’s class was to explain how new emerging technologies have radically changed how countries fight and deter threats across air, land, sea, space, and cyber. And to point out that winning future conflicts requires more than just adopting new technology; it requires a revolution in thinking about how this technology can be acquired and integrated into new weapons systems to drive new operational and organizational concepts that change the way we fight.
This year we’ve expanded the scope of the class to look beyond just the effect of new technology on weapons and operational concepts. We’re now covering how technology will shape all the elements of national power (our influence and footprint on the world stage). National power is the combination of a country’s diplomacy (soft power and alliances), information/ intelligence and its military and economic strength. The instruments of national power brought to bear in this “whole of government approach” were long known by the acronym, DIME (Diplomatic, Information, Military and Economic) and in recent years have expanded to include “FIL”- finance, intelligence and law enforcement-or DIME-FIL. Given the broadened scope of the class, we’ve tweaked the course title to Technology, Innovation and Great Power Competition.
Our goals in this year’s class are to:
Help our students understand how each component of our national security and instruments of national power are now inexorably intertwined with commercial technology. We will explore the complexity and urgency of the impact of the 21st century onslaught of commercial technologies (AI, machine learning, autonomy, biotech, cyber, commercial access to space, et al.) in all parts of the government — State, climate change, Department of Defense, economic policy, et al.
Give them hands-on experience to propose and prototype solutions to these problems.
Much like last year’s class, this one has three parts – teaching team lectures, guest speakers, and most importantly team projects. We’ll be using the concept of commercial technologies’ impact on DIME as the connective element between each week’s class.
In addition to the teaching team lectures and assigned readings, last year we had 20+ guest speakers including two Secretaries of Defense, a Secretary of State, members of Congress, Generals, Admirals and policy makers. We hope to enrich the student experience with similar expertise and experience this year.
Last year, team projects started with a mid-term paper and finished with what was supposed be a final paper project. However, one team took their project, got out of the building, and interviewed and presented a radically new operational concept for the South China Sea. It’s an idea that has caught fire. So this year we’re going to build on that success. Teams will form on week 1, pick an area of interest across DIME and spend the quarter interviewing key stakeholders, beneficiaries, policy makers, etc. while testing proposed solutions.
If the past is a prologue, our students, a mix between international policy and engineering, will be the ones in this fight. They’ll go off to senior roles in State, Defense, policy and to the companies building new disruptive technologies.
This is the first in a series of classes from the new Stanford Gordian Knot Center for National Security. (More on this in later post.) Catch up with the class by reading summaries of Classes 1, 2, 3, 4,56, 7 and 8.)
Lessons Learned
Technology, Innovation and Great Power Competition will focus on how our national security and national power is intertwined with commercial technology. We will explore:
AI, machine learning, autonomy, biotech, cyber, commercial access to space, et al.
In all parts of the government; State, climate change, Department of Defense, economic policy, et al.
Give our students hands-on experience to propose and prototype solutions to these problems
Revolutions start by overturning the status quo. By the end of the 20th century, case studies and business plans had reached an evolutionary dead-end for entrepreneurs. Here’s why and what we did about it.
The Rise of Business Schools – Management as an Occupation The business school was invented in the first decade of the 20th century in response to a massive economic transformation in the U.S. that took place in the last quarter of the 19th century. The country exited the Civil War as a nation of small businesses and ended the century with large national corporations (railroads, steel, oil, food, insurance, etc.). These explosions in company size and scale created a demand for professional managers. In 1908 Harvard Business School filled that need by creating a graduate degree – the Master of Business Administration. Its purpose was to educate management on best practices to run existing companies.
The MBA Curriculum – From Fieldwork to Case Studies When Harvard started the MBA program there were no graduate-level business textbooks. The school used the “problem-method” which emphasized fieldwork – getting out of the classroom and visiting real companies– as an important part of the curriculum. Students observed how executives worked, interviewed them, and wrote up how real managers solved problems. Students then discussed these problems and solutions in class.
First Case Study-General Shoe
By the early 1920s a new dean changed the curriculum – shifting it from an industry orientation (steel, railroads, etc.) – to a functional one (marketing, factory and employment management (HR), etc.). This focus on a functional curriculum involved a switch to the case method; fieldwork now took second place. The case method assumes that students learn when they participate in a discussion of a theoretical situation they may face when they are a decision-maker rather than a real one they see in the field.
By 1923, 2/3rds of the courses at Harvard were taught with the case method, and the pattern was set for business education for the rest of the 20th century.
Entrepreneurship Becomes a Subject in Business Schools While MBA programs proliferated during the first half of the 20th century, they focused on teaching management of existing companies. There were no classes on how to start a business. That is until 1947 when Myles Mace taught the first entrepreneurship course “Management of New Enterprises” at Harvard Business School. Soon others were created. In 1953 Peter Drucker offered an Entrepreneurship and Innovation class at New York University, and in 1954 Stanford’s business school offered “Small Business Management” its first small business course.
In 1967 the first contemporary MBA entrepreneurship courses were introduced at Stanford and NYU, and a year later Babson offered the first undergraduate entrepreneurship program. By 1970 sixteen schools were offering entrepreneurship courses, and in 1971 UCLA offered the first MBA in entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship textbooks such as Small Business Management: Essentials of Entrepreneurship and Entrepreneurship: Playing to Win started to appear. In 1985 the University of Miami held the first national business plan competition. By 1991 there were 57 undergraduate and 22 MBA programs. Textbooks, papers, and journal articles proliferated.
By the end of the 20th century entrepreneurship education fell into two categories: 1) starting small businesses and 2) starting high-growth, high-risk scalable startups. But both types of entrepreneurship courses were taught using case studies and taught students how to write and execute a business plan. The curriculum of both types of courses were simply adaptations of what business schools were using to train managers for the administration and execution of existing organizations.
The case method and business plans are the antithesis of how entrepreneurs create startups The case method assumes that students learn when they participate in a discussion of a situation they may someday face as a decision-maker. But the case method is the antithesis of how entrepreneurs create a startup. Cases teaches pattern recognition tools for static patterns—and has limited value as a tool for teaching entrepreneurship. Analyzing a case in the classroom, removed from the realities of a new venture, adds little to an entrepreneur’s preparation for the chaos, uncertainty, and conflicting customer responses that all entrepreneurs face.
Business plans presume that building a startup is a series of predictable steps requiring execution of a plan which assumes a series of known facts: known customers, known features, known pricing, known distribution channel. As a serial entrepreneur turned educator, this didn’t make sense to me. In a new venture none of these things are truly known. The reality is that most business plans don’t survive first contact with customers.
Neither cases nor business plans replicate the actual startup experience. Cases and plans are useful for teaching managers of process, not founders. Founders of startups (and new ventures inside existing companies) are searching for product/market fit and a repeatable and scalable business model. Searching, unlike execution, is not a predictable pattern. An entrepreneur must start with the belief that all their assumptions are simply hypotheses that will undoubtedly be challenged by what they learn from customers.
Yet up until 10 years ago, schools were still teaching entrepreneurs how to build startups on the premise that they were simply smaller versions of large companies. Entrepreneurial education was trapped in the 20th century.
21st Century Entrepreneurship curriculums At the start of the 21st century, after two decades and 8 startups, I retired and had time to think about how VCs directed their startups using business plans. I began formulating the key ideas around what became the Lean Startup – that startups and existing companies were distinctly different – companies execute business models while startups search for them. Consequently the methodologies for launching products in startups were different than for existing companies.
A decade later, I began to teach the foundations of Lean, first at UC Berkeley (Customer Development) and then at Stanford using cases and business plans. After a few years of trial and error in front of a lot of students, I realized that the replacement for the case method was not better cases written for startups and that the replacement for business plans was not how to write better business plans and pitch decks. (I did both!). Instead, we needed a new management stack for company creation.
I posited that teaching “how to write a business plan” might be obsolete.
Let’s Teach Lean Via Experiential Learning First I searched the academic literature trying to learn what methods would best convey information that entrepreneurship students could understand, retain, and put to practical use. There were five parts to consider:
What’s the level of ambiguity, realism and complexity of the course content
How structured are thetasks within the class?
What were the experiential techniques used to deliver the content?
What were the pedagogical components of the class?
How will we deliver feedback to the students?
For each of these parts of the course design we needed to consider where on the spectrum of directedversus experiential each of the five parts of the class would fall.
Direct Guidance Versus Experiential Classes I concluded that best way to teach entrepreneurs (versus managers) was to create an experiential and inquiry-based class that would develop the mindset, reflexes, agility, and resilience needed to search for a business model certainty in a chaotic world.
Experiential learning (also called “active learning” or “learning by doing”) is designed to have a high degree of complexity and realism. It’s not about read and remember, but rather is about problem exploration, design and inventing and iterating solutions. This differs from a traditional class with directed learning where students are taught to remember facts, understand concepts, and perhaps apply procedures but not to discover these by themselves.
In contrast, experiential classes are designed with the theory that people learn best in an unguided or minimally guided environment, where the students, rather than being presented with all of the essential information, must discover, or construct that information rapidly for themselves.
This seemed to me to be the best way to teach entrepreneurship. Experiential learning is the core of how we teach the Lean LaunchPad/I-Corps/Hacking for X classes. Launched in 2011, the Lean LaunchPad capstone entrepreneurship class was unique in that it was:
The class aimed to mimic the uncertainty all startups face as they search for a business model while imparting an understanding of all the components of a business model, not just how to give a pitch or a demo.
The figure below illustrates the spectrum of teaching techniques and shows where our class fits on the right.
The Syllabus We were going to teach entrepreneurship like you teach artists – combining theory with intensive hands-on practice.
This Lean LaunchPad is built around the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. Students start by mapping their initial assumptions (their business model). Each week they test these hypotheses with customers and partners outside the classroom (using customer development), then use iterative and incremental development (agile development) to build Minimal Viable Products.
The goal is to get students out of the building to test each of the 9 parts of their business model (or mission model for Hacking for Defense students), understand which of their assumptions were wrong, and figure out what they need to do to find product/market fit and then a validated business model.
Our objective is to get them using the tools that help startups test their hypotheses and adjust when they learn that their original assumptions are wrong. We want them to experience faulty assumptions not as a crisis, but as a learning event called a pivot —an opportunity to change the model. (More than just for use in startups, these problem-solving skills are increasingly crucial in today’s increasingly complex world.)
Each week every team presents to the teaching team – “Here’s what we thought, here’s what we did, here’s what we learned, here’s what we’re going to do next week.”
Designing the Lean LaunchPad/I-Corps Class – the “Pedagogy” While the Lean LaunchPad/I-Corps/H4X students are experiencing what appears to them to be a fully hands-on, experiential class, it’s a carefully designed illusion. In fact, it’s highly structured. The syllabus has been designed so that we are offering continual implicit guidance, structure, and repetition. This is a critical distinction between our class and an open-ended experiential class.
Guidance, Direction and Structure For example, students start the class with their own initial guidance – they believe they have an idea for a product or service (Lean LaunchPad/I-Corps) or have been given a clear real-world problem (Hacking for Defense). Coming into the class, students believe their goal is to validate their commercialization or deployment hypotheses. (The teaching team knows that over the course of the class, students will discover that most of their initial hypotheses are incorrect.)
Next, the business/mission model canvas offers students guidance, explicit direction, and structure. First, the canvas offers a complete, visual roadmap of all the hypotheses they will need to test over the entire class. Second, the canvas helps the students goal-seek, by visualizing what an optimal endpoint would look like – product/market fit / mission success – would look like. Finally, the canvas provides students with a map of they what they learn week-to-week through their customer discovery work.
(I can’t overemphasize the important role of the canvas. Unlike an incubator or accelerator with no frame, the canvas acts as the connective tissue – the frame – that students can fall back on when they got lost or confused. It allows us to teach the theory of how to turn an idea, need, or problem into commercial practice, week by week a piece at a time.)
Third, the tools for customer discovery (videos, sample experiments, etc.) offer guidance and structure for students to work outside the classroom. The explicit goal of 10-15 customer interviews a week along with the requirement for building a continual series of minimal viable products, provides metrics that track the team’s progress. The mandatory office hours with the instructors and support from mentors provide additional guidance and structure.
Working Memory and Reflection One of the challenges we wanted to avoid is overloading students’ short-term memory. If you give students minimal feedback and provide no structure or guidance, most of what students experience gets forgotten. To counter that, we’ve built three techniques in to reduce the cognitive load: regular summing up, repetition, and reflection. This allows students to transfer their weekly experiences into long-term memory and knowledge.
By design, each week we make students stop, reflect, and summarize their learning (here’s what we thought, here’s what we did, here’s what we found and here’s what we’re going to do next week.) The teams present these reflections, along with required specific deliverables for each week. These weekly presentations also provide reinforcement – students need to remember their learning from each of the prior components in the business/mission model canvas to provide a context for the current week.
In addition to the week-to-week summaries, we give students a reflection week at the end of the class to synthesize, process and integrate those week-to-week learnings. And we teach them how to turn that learning into a compelling story of their learning journey.
Ambiguity, Realism and Complexity Ambiguity in a class means the subject can have multiple right answers. Or even no right answer. Searching for answers to the business and mission problems i.e. product/market fit has maximum ambiguity – there isn’t always a correct answer, nor will the same path get you to the same answer in different circumstances.
Realism in a class means, how well does the class content match an actual problem in practice? Learning accounting in a classroom is likely similar to doing accounting in an office. However, reading case studies about startup problems in a classroom has little connection to the real world and has low realism.
Complexity refers to the number of things that can change that may affect the outcome of a decision. As the number of things that change goes up the so does the complexity of the learning process.
New ventures are ambiguous, real and complex. Teaching “how to write a business plan” as a method to build a startup assumes low ambiguity, low realism, and low complexity when the opposite is true. So we structured the class to model a startup; extremely ambiguous with multiple possible answers (or at times none,) realism in the pressures, chaos and uncertainty of a startup, and complex in trying to understand all parts of a business model.
The Flipped Classroom Inside the classroom, we deliberately trade off lecture time for student/teaching team interaction. The class is run using a “flipped classroom.” Instead of lecturing about the basics during class time, we assign the core lectures, recorded as video clips, as homework.
Instructors then supplement the video lectures with their own in-class short lecture about this week’s business model topic. This allows instructors to use the class time for review of the concepts or short lectures customized for specific domains (e.g., hardware, life sciences, etc.).
Emotional Investment In an experiential class students must be fully immersed in the experience, not just doing what the syllabus says is required of them. Project-based learning engages and motivates students Having each team present weekly in front of their peers raises the commitment (and heart rate) of the students. No one wants to be shown up by another team.
Speed and Tempo Outside Their Comfort Zones One of the goals of the class is to talk to 100 customers and partners. That may seem like an absurdly unreasonable goal, yet all teams manage to do so. Most case-based or project classes do not offer time and resource constraints. Our class is purposely designed to offer maximum ambiguity while pushing students to achieve extraordinary results under relentless pressure and time constraints. We stress a relentless speed and tempo because we believe that learning is enhanced when students are given the opportunity to operate outside of their own perceived comfort zones.
Our objective is to have students experience what it’s like to operate in a real-world startup. Outside the classroom walls conditions will change so rapidly that their originally well thought out plans become irrelevant. If they can’t manage chaos and uncertainty, if they can’t bias themselves for action, and if they wait around for someone else to tell them what to do, then their investors and competitors will make their decisions for them and they will run out of money and their company will die.
Therefore, every successful founder needs a decisive mindset that can quickly separate the crucial from the irrelevant, synthesize the output, and use this intelligence to create islands of order in the all-out chaos of a startup. The class is designed to emulate that chaos and teach a bias for action.
Relentlessly Direct Feedback There’s one last part of our pedagogy that might seem out of place in an experiential class – and that’s the relentlessly direct model of feedback.
The class moves at breakneck speed and is designed to create immediate action in time-, resource-, and cash-constrained environments. The teaching team practices Radical Candor – caring personally while challenging directly. At its core, Radical Candor is guidance and feedback that’s both kind and clear, specific, and sincere, and focused on helping the other person grow.
We give the students public feedback about the quality and quantity of their work in front of their peers weekly. For some, it’s the first time they’ve ever heard “not good enough.”
Class Design – Summary The design of the class was a balance between ambiguity, complexity and uncertainty with structure and learning strategies.
While this process is extremely effective, it can be painful to watch. Our natural inclination (at least mine) is to offer specific guidance and solutions. (There are a few times in class when the team may need explicit directions such as, “It’s time to pivot” or “Your team needs to restart.” But these should be exceptions.)
The genius of the class design was making the class look like it wasn’t designed.
Results In the first decade of the Lean LaunchPad class we’ve trained hundreds of other educators around the world to teach the class at their universities. By now 100s of thousands of students have taken some form of the class, and 100’s of companies have been created.
In addition, two government-funded programs have adopted the class at scale. The first was the National Science Foundation I-Corps. Errol Arkilic the then head of commercialization at the National Science adopted the class saying, “You’ve developed the scientific method for startups, using the Business Model Canvas as the laboratory notebook.” I-Corps which is now offered in 100 universities and has trained ~2,500 teams/7,500 scientists in 100 cohorts. The National Institute of Health also teaches a version, I-Corps @ NIH, in the National Cancer Institute.
Today, this Lean LaunchPad/I-Corps syllabus is also the basis for a series of Mission-Driven Entrepreneurship classes– Hacking for Diplomacy, Defense, Oceans, non-profits and cities. Hacking for Defense is now taught in over 55 universities in the U.S., with versions of the course offered in the UK and Australia.
While the Lean LaunchPad/I-Corps curriculum was a revolutionary break with the past, it’s not the end. In the last decade enumerable variants have emerged. The class we teach at Stanford has continued to evolve. Better versions from others will appear. And one day another revolutionary break will take us to the next level.
We just finished the 11thannual Lean LaunchPad class at Stanford — our first version focused on deep science and technology.
I’ve always thought of the class as a minimal viable product – testing new ideas and changing the class as we learn. This year was no exception as we made some major changes, all of which we are going to keep going forward.
A focus on scientists and engineers. We created an additional Spring section of the class with a focus on commercializing inventions from Stanford’s scientists and engineers. The existing winter quarter of the class remains the same as we taught for the last 10 years – taking all students’ projects – e-commerce, social media, web, and mobile apps. This newly created Spring section focuses on scientists and engineers who want to learn how to commercialize deep science and technology – life sciences (medical devices, diagnostics, digital health, therapeutics,) semiconductors, health care, sensors, materials, artificial intelligence/deep learning, et al.
This allowed us to emphasize how to differentiate a technical spec from a value proposition and expand on the parts of the business model that are unique for science and engineering startups. For example, life sciences versus commercial applications have radically different reimbursement, regulatory, clinical trials, scientific advisory boards, demand creation, etc. In addition, we found we needed to add new material on Intellectual Property, how to license inventions from the university, and discussions about team dynamics. Going forward we’ll continue to offer the class in two sections with the second class focused on science and technology.
Remote Discovery – As the pandemic forced teaching remotely, we’ve learned that customer discovery is actually more efficient using video conferencing. It increased the number of interviews the students were able to do each week. When Covid restrictions are over, we plan to add remote customer discovery to the students’ toolkit. It remains to be seen whether customers will remain as available on Zoom as they were during the pandemic. (See here for an extended discussion of remote customer discovery.) Remote discovery also allowed a bigger pool of potential interviews not bounded by geography. The quality of interviewees seemed to improve by this larger pool.
Class size/configuration – For the past decade our class size was 8 teams of 4. This year we accepted 12 teams of 4. Previously all teams needed to sit through all 8 weekly presentations. That was tough in person and not sustainable via Zoom. This year, by moving into two breakout sections, we cut the number of presentations that each team sat through by half. The new format allowed students and teaching staff to devote greater attention to each presentation.
Adopt a team – in past years all instructors had office hours with all the teams. This year each instructor adopted three teams and saw them weekly for a half hour. Students really appreciated building a closer working relationship with one faculty member.
Alumni as guest speakers – Most weeks we invited a past student to guest speak about their journey through the class, highlighting “what I wish I knew” and “what to pay attention to.”
Below are the Lessons Learned presentations from the Lean LaunchPad for deep science and technology, as well as additional learnings from the class.
During the quarter the teams spoke to 1,237 potential customers, beneficiaries, regulators – all via Zoom. Most students spent 15-20 hours a week on the class, about double that of a normal class.
Team Gloflow
Started on Week 1 as a pathology slide digitization service.
Ended in Week 10 as response prediction for cancer treatments.
Started on Week 1 as wearable gesture control device for real and virtual worlds.
Ended in Week 10 as a future-proof gesture control solution for AR headsets and the Department of Defense.
Started on Week 1 as a custom silicon chip with embedded memories and a Machine Learning accelerator targeting low-power, high-throughput, and low-latency applications.
Ended in Week 10 as a chip enabling AI vision applications on next generation battery powered surveillance cameras.
Started on Week 1 as a Biomimetic Sleeve as a Left Ventricular Assist Device.
Ended in Week 10 as a Platform technology as a right heart failure device.
Started on Week 1 as a Menopause digital health platform that connects women to providers and other women.
Ended in Week 10 as a D2C Menopause symptom tracking app and on-demand telehealth platform that offers women a personalized and integrative approach to menopause care.
Started on Week 1 as an IOT hardware sensor for environmental quality and human presence.
Ended in Week 10 as hybrid work collaboration + employee engagement.
Started on Week 1 as a platform for finding and managing at-home senior care.
Ended in Week 10 as a B2C platform for scheduling on-demand at-home senior care.
Started on Week 1 as a provider for autonomous drone delivery for restaurants and grocery stores.
Ended in Week 10 as Fleet management software for autonomous drone delivery.
Student Comments I normally don’t include student comments in these summaries, but this year’s summarized why – after a decade – we still teach the class. The students find the class hard and exhausting, and say their instructors are tough and demanding. Yet in the end, the class and the work they invest in is highly rewarding to them.
“Awesome course- one of the best I’ve taken so far. You get out what you put into it, but find a team you like working with, get ready to hustle and work hard, and trust the process. A must-take for entrepreneurs!”
“Absolutely crucial to starting a company for a first-time founder. Couldn’t imagine a better teaching team or learning environment.”
“Very worth taking, whether you want to do a start-up your own or not.”
“Recommend to everyone considering entrepreneurship or want to learn about it.”
“Great class if you are interested in learning about the Customer Discovery Model, but takes a lot of time and work.”
“Intense course where you learn through experience on how to build a startup. I came with a product and I learned to find a solution and how to build from there.”
“Incredible experience – really glad I took the class and happy with the outcome.”
“Steve Blank tells you your slides are ugly”
“Take this course if you get a chance, especially if you are a PhD student. Super useful and a different kind of learning than most case-based classes. Extremely experiential.”
“A great class to learn about customer discovery and entrepreneurship methodologies! The teaching team is incredibly experienced and very honest in their feedback. It is quite time intensive and heavily based on your team. Make sure to clarify expectations with your team beforehand and communicate.”
“Definitely recommend this course, it’s a great experience and will give you tools to launch your idea.”
“A really excellent course to take to learn about entrepreneurship! An invaluable opportunity you might not find anywhere else. The instructors are extremely knowledgeable veteran entrepreneurs who give all the support and encouragement needed.”
Diversity In past years, the students in the class were mostly men, reflecting the makeup of the applicants. While Ann Miura-Ko was part of the original teaching team, having all male instructors for the last five years didn’t help. Mar Hershenson joined the teaching team in 2018 and made an all-out effort to recruit women to apply. In this new Spring section of the class Heidi Roizen and Jennifer Carolan joined us as instructors. Mar, Heidi and Jennifer are all successful VC’s. They sponsored lunch sessions, mixers and meetings with women entrepreneurs and alumni for female students interested in the class and for male students looking to work with a more diverse team. I am happy to report that as a result of many people’s hard work the gender balance in the class substantially changed. Our Spring cohort focused on deep science and tech had 51 students — 25 were women.
The lessons for me were: 1) the class had been unintentionally signaling a “boys-only” environment, 2) these unconscious biases were easily dismissed by assuming that the class makeup simply reflected the applicant pipeline, and 3) when in fact it required active outreach by a woman to change that perception and bring more women into the pipeline and teams.
Teaching Assistants (TAs) Our Teaching Assistants keep all the moving parts of the class running. This year their job was even more challenging running the class virtually and they made it run like clockwork.
Each year’s TAs have continued to make the class better (although I must admit it was interesting to watch the TAs remove any student uncertainty about what they need to do week-to-week by moving to a more prescriptive syllabus. Originally, I had designed a level of uncertainty into the class to mimic what a real-world startup feel like.) However, the art of teaching this class is remembering that it wasn’t designed by a focus group.
A Great Class Endures Beyond Its Author I’ve always believed that great classes continue to thrive after the original teachers have moved on. While I created the Lean LaunchPad methodology and pedagogy (how to teach the class), over the past decade the Stanford class has had ten additional instructors, thirty-three wonderful TA’s and ninety volunteer mentors.
In addition to myself the teaching team has been:
2011Instructors: Ann Miura-ko, Jon Feiber LeadTA: Thomas Haymore, TA’s: Felix Huber, Christina Cacioppo
2012Instructors: Ann Miura-ko, Jon Feiber LeadTA: Thomas Haymore, TA:, Stephanie Glass
2013Instructors: Ann Miura-ko, Jon Feiber Lead TA: Rick Barber, TA: Stephanie Glass
2014Instructors: Jeff Epstein, Jim Hornthal Lead TA: Soumya Mohan, TA:Stephanie Zhan, Asst: Gabriel Garza, Jennifer Tsau
2015Instructors: Jeff Epstein, Steve Weinstein TA’s: Stephanie Zhan, Gabriel Garza TAs: Jennifer Tsau, Akaash Nanda, Asst: Nick Hershey
2016Instructors: Jeff Epstein, Steve Weinstein Lead TA: Jose Ignacio del Villar TA’s: Akaash Nanda, Nick Hershey, Zabreen Khan, Asst: Eric Peter
2017Instructors: Jeff Epstein, Steve Weinstein Lead TA: Eric Peter TA’s:Nick Hershey, Lorel Sim Karan Singhal Asst: Jenny Xia
2018Instructors: Jeff Epstein, Steve Weinstein, Mar Hershenson, George John Lead TA: Jenny Xia TA’s: Anand Upender, Marco Lorenzon, Lorel Sim Asst: Parker Ence, Trent Hazy, Sigalit Perelson
2019Instructors: Jeff Epstein, Steve Weinstein, Mar Hershenson, George John, Tom Bedecarre Lead TA: Parker Ence, Trent Hazy TA’s: Marco Lorenzon, Sigalit Perelson,Lorel SimAsst:, Ashley Wu
2020Instructors: Jeff Epstein, Steve Weinstein, Mar Hershenson, George John, Tom Bedecarre Lead TA: Marco Lorenzon, Ashley Wu TA’s: Sigalit Perelson,Gopal Raman
2021 – WinterInstructors: Jeff Epstein, Mar Hershenson, George John, Tom Bedecarre Lead TA: Erica Meehan, Anand Lalwani, TA’s: Gopal Raman, Andrew Hojel
2021 – SpringInstructors: Steve Weinstein, Heidi Roizen, Jennifer Carolan, Tom Bedecarre Lead TAs: Sandra Ha, Lorenz Pallhuber TA: Manan Rai
Our Decade of Mentors The mentors (industry experts) who volunteer their time have been supported and coordinated by Tom Bedecarre and Todd Basche. Each mentor’s contribution gets graded by the student team they coached.
Bryan Stolle, Charles Hudson, Dan Martell, David Feinlab, David Stewart, Doug Camplejohn, Eric Carr, George Zachary, Gina Bianchini, Heiko Hubertz, Hiten Shah, Jason Davies, Jim Greer, Jim Smith, Jonathan Ebinger, Josh Schwarzapel, Joshua Reeves, Justin Schaffer, Karen Richardson, Marianne Wu, Masheesh Jain, Ravi Belani, Rowan Chapman, Shawn Carolan, Steve Turner, Sven Strohbad, Thomas Hessler, Will Harvey, Ashton Udall, Ethan Bloch, Jonathan Abrams, Nick O’Connor, Pete Vlastellica, Steve Weinstein, Adi Bittan, Alan Chiu, George Zachary, Jeff Epstein, Kat Barr, Konstantin Guericke, Michael Borrus, Scott Harley, Jorge Heraud, Bob Garrow, Eyal Shavit, Ethan Kurzweil, Jim Anderson, George John, Dan Manian, Lee Redden, Steve King, Sunil Nagaraj, Evan Rapoport, Haydi Danielson, Nicholas O’Connor, Jake Seid, Tom Bedecarre, Lucy Lu, Adam Smith, Justin Wickett, Allan May, Craig Seidel, Rafi Holtzman, Roger Ross, Danielle Fong, Mar Hershenson, Heather Richman, Jim Cai, Siqi Mou, Vera Kenehan, Phil Dillard, Susan Golden, Todd Basche, Robert Locke, Maria Amundson, Freddy Dopfel, Don Peppers, Rekha Pai, Radhika Malpani, Michael Heinrich, MariaLena Popo, Jordan Segall, Mike Dorsey, Katie Connor, Anmol Madan, Kira Makagon, Andrew Westergren, Wendy Tsu, Teresa Briggs, Pradeep Jotwani.
And thanks to the continued support of Tom Byers, Tina Seelig, Kathy Eisenhardt, Ritta Katilla, Bob Sutton and Chuck Eesly at Stanford Technology Ventures Program (the entrepreneurship center in the Stanford Engineering School).
Over the weekend I got asked the best way to teach students the principles of Lean via Zoom.
One of the key lessons from our Educators Conference is that when teaching online complex information needs to be delivered to students in small, easily processed parts.
I realized that pre-pandemic I had put together a series of two-minute videos called “See Why.” They’re not only helpful for a formal class but for anyone who wants to review the basics. Here’s what I suggested they offer their students:
This post previously appeared in Poets & Quants.
Click here if you can’t see the Accelerate Basque presentation.
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Click here if you can’t see the Team Information Pollution presentation.
Click here if you can’t see the Team Wicked Space presentation.
Click here if you can’t see the Future Proof the Navy presentation.
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