Build Back Better – The Educators Summit

SAVE THE DATE for the 3rd edition of Lean Innovation Educators Summit
December 16th, 10 – 1pm PST, 1 – 4pm EST6 – 9pm UTC

In July 2020, 400+ educators gathered online to discuss and share best practices for Lean education in the virtual environment. We learned a ton.  And we’re going to do it again.

Join me, Jerry Engel, Pete Newell, and Steve Weinstein and over 1,000 educators from 65 countries and 220 universities for our next Lean Innovation Educators Summit.

Why?
COVID-19 has dramatically altered the business landscape. Main Street businesses are severely affected. While many parts of the high-tech sector are growing, others are either contracting or shutting down. Amid these uncertain times we believe that Lean educators can prepare students for this new investing climate and help communities recover.We’ll discuss how the pandemic has shifted not just the way we teach, but also what we teach about today’s investing climate and how we can use the Lean methodology to make an impact on our communities.

What
While we’ll hear from investors and Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University, the heart of the summit are the breakout sessions. In these sessions you and your peers can discuss and share best practices with Lean educators from around the world.  We’ll then share the results of the breakout sessions with everyone.

Our breakout session leaders include:
Tom Bedecarré -Stanford University, Chris Taylor- Georgetown University, Philip Bouchard- TrustedPeer, Jim Hornthal – UC Berkeley, Michael Marasco – Northwestern University, Bob Dorf – SOM, Dave Chapman – University College London, Paul Fox – LaSalle Univ Barcelona, Phil Weilerstein – VentureWell, Jim Chung – GWU, Todd Warren, Jeff Reid – Georgetown University, Ali Hawks – CMP, Radhika Malpani – Google, Stephanie Marrus – UCSF – Jessica Fields – CUNY, Todd Morrill – VMG, Rathindra [Babu] DasGupta – University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Micah Kotch – Urban-X and Logan Petkosek, Nicole Liddle, Emily McMahan.

Thanks to the Common Mission Project team and organizers – Logan Petkosek, Nicole Liddle, Emily McMahan.

How
This session is free to all but limited to Innovation educators. You can register for the event here and/or learn more on our website. We look forward to gathering as a community of educators to shape the future of Lean Innovation Education.

When
See you on December 16th 10 – 1pm PST1pm – 4pm EST, 6pm-9pm UTC.
Register here
Live captioning for the hearing impaired.

The Educators Summit: Adapting to the COVID Economy

In July 2020, 400+ educators gathered online to discuss and share best practices for Lean education in the virtual environment. We learned a ton.  And we’re going to do it again.

Join me, Jerry Engel, Pete Newell, and Steve Weinstein for the 3rd edition of Lean Innovation Educators Summit on December 16th, 1 – 4pm EST, 6 – 9pm UTC

Why
COVID-19 has dramatically altered the business landscape. Main Street businesses are severely affected. While many parts of the high-tech sector are growing, others are either contracting or shutting down. Amid these uncertain times we believe that Lean educators can prepare students for this new investing climate and help communities recover.

We’ll discuss how the pandemic has shifted not just the way we teach, but also what we teach about today’s investing climate and how we can use the Lean methodology to make an impact on our communities.

What
We’ll hear from investors, entrepreneurs, public policy leaders and of course your colleagues on how we can help our communities adjust, recover and rebound.

The event will begin with a panel of VC, government and private capital investors and then a fireside chat about the future of the investing climate and COVID recovery efforts. We’ll then go into breakout sessions so you can discuss and share best practices with your peer Lean educators from around the world.

How
This session is free to all, but limited to Innovation educators. You can register for the event here and/or learn more on our website. We look forward to gathering as a community of educators to shape the future of Lean Innovation Education.

When
See you on December 16th 1pm – 4pm EST, 6pm-9pm UTC.

Register here

 

Hacking 4 Recovery – Time to Take A Shot

Rise Up

“Let’s do something to help with the pandemic.” In April, with the economy crashing, and the East Coast in lockdown, I heard this from Stanford instructors Tom Bedecarre and Todd Basche, both on the same day. And my response to them was the same, “I can’t sew masks and I don’t know how to make ventilators.” But after thinking about it, it dawned on to me that we could contribute – by creating a class to help existing businesses recover and new ones to start.

And so, Hacking for Recovery began, starting first at Stanford and next offered by University of Hawaii for the State of Hawaii.

After teaching 70 teams – 50 at Stanford and 20 in Hawaii – 275+ entrepreneurs – we’ve proven three things: 1) people can take control of what happens to their lives/careers during and after the pandemic, 2) in five days teams can make extraordinary progress in validating a business model and, 3) this process can be replicated in other areas of the country that need to recover and rebuild businesses.

Here’s how it happened.


I realized we had the ability to rapidly launch a large number of companies on the path of validating their business models. We could offer a 5-day version of the Lean LaunchPad / Hacking For Defense / National Science Foundation I-Corps class that’s trained tens of thousands of entrepreneurs. The class already existed. I had been teaching it at Columbia University for the last seven years. Brainstorming with my Stanford co-instructor Steve Weinstein, we streamlined the material for a virtual class, and told Tom and Todd we could do it.

In two months, they recruited 200 students (50 teams) on 6 continents and in more than a dozen countries. What united the students was their belief that while the pandemic had disrupted their lives, here was an opportunity to shape their own future.

To support them we found 31 mentors, and 4 great Teaching Assistants. The entire course – from team recruitment to the actual class sessions – was hosted online through Zoom.

We ran the Stanford class three times, each in 5-day sessions. (The syllabus is here.)

The teams were able to do customer discovery via video conferencing (getting out of the building without physically getting out of the building) averaging 44 interviews in 5 days. In aggregate they interviewed 2,259 customers. But it just wasn’t the aggregate numbers that were impressive it was how much they learned in five days.

The results?

200 students will never be the same. Rather than bemoaning their circumstances, they decided to rise up and take their best shot. Immersed in a rapid-fire hands-on experience, and surrounded by mentors and subject matter experts, every team not only changed the trajectory of their company but left having learned a methodology for high-speed business model validation to help jump-start a business idea in these chaotic times and beyond.

The topics the teams worked on mirrored the opportunities created caused by the pandemic and sequestering. Over 40% were working on telemedicine, 28% in remote education or remote work. Other teams tackled problems in travel, small business, sustainability, etc. The 50 team concepts at Stanford fell into these categories:

  • 21 Health/Telemedicine
  • 9 Education
  • 5 Remote Work
  • 3 Travel
  • 3 Sustainability
  • 3 Small Business
  • 6 others

More than 15 of the teams have already committed to continue to pursue their startup ideas and are applying to accelerators and seeking funding.

When the sessions at Stanford were completed, we helped the University of Hawaii and Maui Economic Development Board STEMworks launch the Hawaii version of Hacking 4 Recovery – to rebuild the State’s economy, which has been uniquely devastated by the coronavirus lockdown. 20 teams just finished their program. With more to come. Other regions can do the same.

Take a look at a selection of the presentations below from Stanford’s cohorts. Considering some of the teams consisted of incoming freshmen, their progress is kind of mind blowing.

While we enabled 70 teams to start companies, what we really generated was hope – and a path to new opportunities.


AntiCovidAI – a novel mobile app to detect COVID-19 symptoms. Team included Stanford undergrad, Stanford alum, DCI Fellow, Stanford staff member and a graduate student taking courses at Stanford. We had 21/50 teams focused on health/telemedicine concepts

Nightingale – a telemedicine platform connecting nurses to caregivers to close the home healthcare gap.

Diffusion – led by a Stanford Ph.D, this team is developing a sensor to prevent head and neck injuries from falls, especially for seniors in nursing homes.

Edusquared– this team of 4 women who just graduated high school and are entering Stanford in September created an educational subscription box for young Special Ed students. 9 of the teams worked on Education concepts.

Work From Anywhere – the team designed a service to help people move to new locations as remote working allows employees to work from anywhere. 5 teams developed concepts related to Remote Work.

Eye-Dentify – was led by a Knight Hennessy Scholar who wants to help bring eyecare to remote underserved areas. Many of the teams focused on social impact.

Escape Homework – team developed an “Escape Room” platform to make remote learning for k-12 students  fun and engaging. (Post class, the team wrote a blog post describing their experience in the class. Worth a read here.  And they shared their page on virtual educational resources here.)

Voyage – was a global travel advisory platform for pandemic information.

Parrot – fun language app – crossing Duolingo with TikTok. Four rising Stanford sophomore women.

All 50 Stanford presentations are here: Session 1, Session 2 and Session 3.

Total Stanford participants: 200 (Men 51%, Women 49%)
Representing a broad cross-section of the Stanford Community:

  • undergrads  25%
  • graduate  14%
  • Summer Session Students  10%
  • Alumni  30%
  • Faculty/Staff  2%
  • DCI Fellows  3%
  • Other/misc.  16%

Thanks to the instructors who taught the class: Tom Bedecarre, Steve Weinstein and Pete Newell and to the guest lecturers: Mar Hershenson, Tina Seelig, and Heidi Roizen.

In addition to the instructors, each team had mentors who volunteered their time: Jim Anderson, Adi Bittan, Teresa Briggs, Rachel Costello, Phil Dillard, Freddy Dopfel, Mimi Dunne, Dave Epstein, Eleanor Haglund, Joy Fairbanks, Susan Golden, Rafi Holtzman, Pradeep Jotwani, Phillipe Jorge, Vera Kenehan, Robert Locke, Kris McCleary, Radhika Malpani, Stephanie Marrus, Allan May, Rekha Pai,Don Peppers, Alejandro Petschankar, Kevin Ray, Heather Richman, Eric Schrader, Craig Seidel, Kevin Thompson, Wendy Tsu, Lisa Wallace. Plus another 27 subject matter experts as support.

And when a class with a million moving parts appears seamless to the students it’s directly proportional to the amount of work behind the scenes. Without our teaching assistants who volunteered their time none of it would have happened: Head TA’s: Valeria Rincon / Jin Woo Yu and TA’s Nicole Orsak and Diva Sharma.

Lessons learned

  • While we enabled 70 teams to start companies, what we really generated was hope and a path to new opportunities
  • With the open source curriculum available here, it’s possible for any school or region to get a version of this class ready in 8-10 weeks
    • The 5-day format of the class works well
    • It can stand alone or complement the 10-week or 14-week courses
  • Having teaching assistants are critical to managing the admin side of marketing, recruiting, team formation, communications and overall support for the teaching team
    • Team formation requires heavy lifting of emails/team mixers/team – as well as match-making by TA’s and instructors
  • Having a large pool of mentors and subject matter experts is important in 5-day crash course, to support teams looking for interview subjects and contacts for customer discovery

Teaching Lean Innovation in the Pandemic

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

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

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

Here’s what we learned.

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

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

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

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

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

If you can’t see the presentation slides click here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teaching Assistant
Having a Teaching Assistant is critical

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

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

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

(All the breakout session slides are here.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

The video of the entire summit can be seen here

Educators Summit: Lessons from Teaching in the Pandemic

SAVE THE DATE for the Lean Innovation Educators Summit:
Lessons from Teaching in the Pandemic
July 24, 10-noon Pacific, 1-3pm Eastern, 6-8pm London

As educators the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged us all.

We’ve faced the challenges of teaching remotely, while virtually managing students scattered across the world, keeping students enthusiastic and engaged via video, helping them conduct customer discovery when they can’t get out of the building, and rolling with uncertain teaching schedules now and in the future. We’ve all been making it up as we go and have begun to see a glimmer of patterns of what’s worked and what hasn’t. 

Since the Pandemic we’ve taught three classes remotely – Hacking for Defense, Hacking for Oceans and our first of three Hacking for Recovery classes. I know I’ve learned a ton – some surprisingly good and some just surprisingly.

But more importantly there are hundreds of educators who have also learned valuable lessons. If you’ve learned something you’d like to share, or would like to hear how others are modifying their pedagogical approaches for the pandemic, you’re invited to join us virtually and collectively in this two-hour on-line session (with an additional one hour of breakout sessions for follow-up discussions on topics of interest.)

Some of the topics we’ll cover include:

  • Converting and scaling existing programs and classes
  • Standing up new programs from scratch
  • Improving diversity and inclusion in tech innovation education
  • Addressing K-12 opportunities
We invite you to submit your own instructional innovations for a virtual poster session. We will also be having subgroup discussions to engage in active give and take.

So save the date for the Lean Innovation Educators Summit on July 24th, 2020.

This session is free to all, but limited to Innovation educators. You can register for the event here and/or learn more on our website. We look forward to gathering as a community of educators to shape the future of Lean Innovation Education in the COVID-19 era. 

Clayton Christensen

Say not in grief he is no more – but live in thankfulness that he was

If you’re reading my blog, odds are you know who Clayton Christensen was. He passed away this week and it was a loss to us all.

Everyone who writes about innovation stood on his shoulders.

His insights transformed the language and the practice of innovation.

Christensen changed the trajectory of my career and was the guide star for my work on innovation. I never got to say thank you.

Eye Opening
I remember the first time I read the Innovator’s Dilemma in 1997. Christensen, writing for a corporate audience, explained that there were two classes of products – sustaining and disruptive. His message was that existing companies are great at sustaining technologies and products but were ignoring the threat of disruption.

He explained that companies have a penchant for continually improving sustaining products by adding more features to solve existing customer problems, and while this maximized profit, it was a trap. Often, the sustaining product features exceed the needs of some segments and ignore the needs of others. The focus on sustaining products leaves an opening for new startups with “good enough” products (and willing to initially take lower profits) to enter underserved or unserved markets. These new entrants were the disruptors.

By targeting these overlooked segments, the new entrants could attract a broader base of customers, iterate rapidly, and adopt new improvements faster (because they have less invested infrastructure at risk). They eventually crossed a threshold where they were not only cheaper but also better or faster than the incumbent. And then they’d move upmarket into the incumbents’ markets. At that tipping point the legacy industry collapses. (See Kodak, Blockbuster, Nokia, etc.)

Christensen explained it wasn’t that existing companies didn’t see the new technologies/ products/ markets. They operated this way because their existing business models didn’t allow them to initially profit from those opportunities – so they ignored them – and continued to chase higher profitability in more-demanding segments.

Reading The Innovator’s Dilemma was a revelation. In essence, Christensen was explaining how disruptors with few resources could eat the lunch of incumbents. When I finished, I must have had 25 pages of notes. I had never read something so clear, and more importantly, so immediately applicable to what we were about to undertake.

We had just started an enterprise software company, Epiphany, and we were one of those disruptors. I remember looking at my notes and I realized I held a step-by-step playbook to run rings around incumbents. All I had to do is to exploit all the gaps and weaknesses that were inherent in incumbent companies.

We did.

Thank you, Clay for opening my eyes.

Inspiration
Christensen’s impact didn’t end there. For the last 20 years he inspired me to think differently about innovation and teaching.

Building better startups
After retiring I began to think about the nature of startup innovation and entrepreneurship. It dawned on me that the implicit assumption startups had operated under was that startups were simply smaller versions of large companies.  Over time, I realized that was wrong – large companies executed known business models, while startups searched for them.

I went back and reread the Innovator’s Dilemma and then a ton of the literature on corporate innovation. My goal was to figure out how to crack the code for startups like Christensen did for corporations. My first book The Four Steps to Epiphany was a pale shadow of his work, but it did the job. Customer Development became one of the three parts of the Lean Startup as Eric Ries and Alexander Osterwalder provided the other two components (Agile Engineering and the business model canvas.) Today, the pile of books on startup innovation and entrepreneurship likely equals the literature on corporate innovation.

Teaching a different kind of innovator
Unlike corporate executives, founders are closer to artists than executives – they see things others don’t, and they spend their careers passionately trying to bring that vision to life. That passion powers them through the inevitable ups and downs of success and failures. Therefore, for founders, entrepreneurship wasn’t a job, but a calling.

Understanding the students Clay was teaching gave me the confidence that we needed to do something different. The result was the Lean LaunchPad, I-Corps and Hacking for Defense — classes for a different type of student that emulated the startup experience.

Dropping the curtain on Innovation Theater
The next phase of my career was trying to understand why the tools we built for startups ended up as failing (i.e. Innovation Theater) in companies and government organizations, rather than creating actual innovation.

Here again I referred to Christensen’s work not only in the Innovators Dilemma, but the Innovators Solution. He had introduced the idea that customers don’t buy a product, rather than they hire it for a “job to be done.” And offered a set of heuristics for launching disruptive businesses.

I realized what he and other management thinkers had long figured out. That if you don’t engage the other parts of the organization in allowing innovation to occur, existing processes and procedures will strangle innovation in its crib. In the end companies and government agencies need an innovation doctrine – a shared body of beliefs of how innovation is practiced – and an innovation pipeline – an end to end process for delivery and deployment of innovation.

Thank you, Clay for all the inspiration to see further as an educator.

How to Measure your Life
For me, Clay’s most important lesson, one that put his life’s work in context, was his book How to Measure Your Life.

In it, Christensen reminded all of us to put the purpose of our lives front and center as we decide how to spend our time, talents, and energy. And in the end the measure of a life is not time. It’s the impact you make serving God, your family, community, and country. Your report-card is whether the world is a better place.

He touched all of us and made us better.

Thank you, Clay for reminding us what is important.

You left us way too early.

Getting Schooled – Lessons from an Adjunct

This post previously appeared in Poets and Quants

I’ve been an adjunct professor for nearly two decades. Here’s what I’ve learned.


Colleges and universities that offer entrepreneurs the opportunity to teach innovation and entrepreneurship classes may benefit from a more formal onboarding process.

The goal would be six-fold:

  1. Integrate adjuncts as partners with their entrepreneurship centers 
  2. Create repeatable and scalable processes for onboarding adjuncts
  3. Expose adjuncts to the breadth and depth of academic research in the field
  4. Expose faculty to current industry practices
  5. Create a stream of translational entrepreneurship literature for practitioners (founders and VC’s.) 
  6. Create fruitful and mutually beneficial relationships between traditional research faculty and adjunct faculty.

In my experience as both an adjunct and a guest speaker at a number of universities, I’ve observed the often-missed opportunity to build links between faculty research and practitioner experience. Entrepreneurial centers have recognized the benefits of both, but a more thoughtful effort to build stronger relationships between research and practice—and the faculty and adjuncts who are teaching – can result in better classes, strengthen connections between research and practice, build the Center’s knowledge base and enhance the reputation of the Center and its program.  (See here for what that would look like.)

An adjunct is a non-tenure track, part-time employee. Innovation and entrepreneurship programs in most schools use experienced business practitioners as lecturers or adjunct faculty to teach some or all of their classes. In research universities with entrepreneurship programs adjuncts are typically founders, VC’s or business executives. Tenure track faculty focus on research in innovation and entrepreneurship while the adjuncts teach the “practice” of entrepreneurship.

It’s Been A Trip
I’ve been an adjunct for almost 18 years, and I still remember the onboarding process at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. I started as a guest lecturer, essentially walk-on entertainment, where the minimal entry was proving that I could form complete sentences and tell engaging stories from my eight startups that illustrated key lessons in entrepreneurship.

Feeling like I had passed some test (which I later learned really was a test), I then graduated to co-teaching a class with Jerry Engel, the Founding Executive Director of the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship at Haas. Here I had to master someone else’s curriculum, hold the attention of the class and impart maximum knowledge with minimum damage to the students. While I didn’t realize it, I was passing another test.  

I knew I wanted to write a book about a (then) radically new entrepreneurship idea called Customer Development (later the foundation of the Lean Startup movement). Concurrently, Jerry needed an entrepreneurial marketing course, and suggested that if I first created my class, a book would emerge from it. He was right. The Four Steps to the Epiphany, the book that launched the Lean Startup movement, was based on the course material from my first class. I don’t know who was more surprised – Jerry hearing that an adjunct wanted to create a course or me hearing Jerry say, “Sure, go ahead. We’ll get it approved.”  

And here’s where the story gets interesting. John Freeman, the Faculty Director of the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship at Haas, began to mentor me as I started teaching my class. While I expected John to drop in to monitor how and what I was teaching, I was pleasantly surprised when he suggested we grab coffee once a week. Each week, over the course of the semester, John gently pointed (prodded) me to read specific papers from the academic literature that existed on customer discovery in the enterprise and adjacent topics. In exchange, I shared with him my feedback on whether the theory matched the practice and what theory was missing. And herein lies the tale.

I got a lot smarter discovering an entire universe of papers and people who had researched and thought long and hard about innovation and entrepreneurship. While no one had the exact insights about startups I was exploring, the breadth and depth of what I didn’t know was staggering. More importantly, my book, customer development, and the Lean methodology were greatly influenced by all the research that had preceded me. In hindsight, I consider it a work of translational entrepreneurship. 18 years later I’m still reading new papers and drawing new insights that allow me to further refine ideas in the classroom and outside it.

The Relationship of Faculty, Staff and Adjuncts
What I had accidentally stumbled into at U.C. Berkeley was a rare event. The director of the entrepreneurship center and the faculty research director were working as a team to build a department which explored both research and practice in depth. Together, in just a few years, they used the guest speaker > to co-teacher > to teacher methodology to build a professional faculty of over a dozen instructors.

A few lessons from that experience:
A successful adjunct program starts with the mindset of the faculty research director and the team building skills of the center director. If they recognize that the role of adjuncts is to both teach students practical lessons and to keep faculty abreast of real-world best practices, the relationship will flourish. 

However, in some schools, this faculty-adjunct relationship may become problematic. Faculty may see the role of adjuncts in their department as removing the drudgework of “teaching” from the research faculty so the faculty can pursue the higher calling of entrepreneurial research, publishing and advising PhD students. In this case, adjuncts at the entrepreneurial center are treated as a source of replaceable low-cost teaching assets (somewhere above TA’s and below PhD students.) The result is a huge missed opportunity for a collaborative relationship, one that can enhance the stature and ranking of the department.

When there is support from the faculty research director, the director of the entrepreneurship center can build a stronger program that enhances the reputation of the faculty, program and school.

At U.C. Berkeley this support eventually led the entire school to change its policy toward adjuncts, giving them formal recognition – designating them ‘professional faculty,’ creating a shared office space suite, inviting adjuncts to participate in some faculty meetings, etc.

A side effect of this type of collaboration is that the faculty-adjunct relationship offers the school an opportunity to co-create translational entrepreneurship.

Translational entrepreneurship is fancy term for linking entrepreneurial research with the work of entrepreneurs. As a process, adjuncts would read an academic paper, understand it, see if and how it can be relevant to practitioners (founders, VC’s, corporate exec or employees) and then sharing it with a wide audience.

While Jerry and John built a great process, they didn’t document it. When John Freeman passed away and Jerry Engel retired, the onboarding process went with them. Linked here is my attempt to capture some of these best practices in an “Onboarding Adjuncts Handbook” for directors of entrepreneurship centers and adjuncts.

It’s worth a look.

Lessons Learned

A small investment in building repeatable and scalable processes for onboarding adjuncts would:

  • Allow entrepreneurship centers to integrate adjuncts as partners 
  • Expose adjuncts to the breadth and depth of academic research in the field
  • Potentially create a stream of translational entrepreneurship literature for practitioners (founders and VC’s.) 
  • The result would be:
    • Better adjunct-led classes
    • Deeper connections between research and practice
    • Better and more relevant academic research
    • Enhanced reputation of the center and its program
  • See here for a suggested onboarding handbook
    • Comments, suggestions and additions welcomed

We Needed a Bigger Room – The Lean Educators Summit

It’s a bit bittersweet. We used to be able to fit all the Lean Educators in my living room and have space left over. No longer.

Turns out we needed a bigger room for the Dec 4th-5th Lean Educators Summit.

The good news is that if we’ve turned you away or you were on the waiting list we moved to a bigger venue.


It’s been almost a decade since we first started teaching the Lean Methodology. It’s remade entrepreneurship education, startup practice and innovation in companies and the government. But in all that time, we haven’t gotten a large group of educators together to talk about what it’s been like to teach Lean or the impact it’s had in their classrooms and beyond. It dawned on us that with 10 years of Lessons Learned to explore, now would be a good time.

This one class launched the National Science Foundation I-Corps program, (designed to help turn our country’s best academic research into companies), the I-Corps @ the National Institute of Health, I-Corps @ the Department of Energy, I-Corps @ NSA, Hacking for Defense and Hacking for Diplomacy, Hacking for Cities and Hacking for Non-profits. Hacking for Oceans is coming next.

Educators Sharing Best Practices
So, for the first time ever, Jerry Engel, Pete Newell and Steve Weinstein and I are getting all educators from all these groups together for a “share best practices” summit – December 4th – 5th.

We’re going to cover:

  • The effectiveness of our programs [including I-Corps and Hacking for Defense]: What we have learned so far and how to make it better
  • Customer Discovery and Lean Innovation in Academic Settings vs Non-Academic Settings such as incubators and accelerators
  • Tech Commercialization: innovators vs. entrepreneurs –  motivating scientists and engineers
  • Lean Innovation in the Enterprise, Not-for-Profit and Government – what’s different
  • International: Success and Challenges of Lean Innovation and Customer Discovery in  Europe and Asia [and South America? Australia?]
  • What’s next for Lean and entrepreneurial education
  • and much more…

Agenda is below.

Register here

See you there!

Who Ever Thought? The Lean Educators Summit

It’s been almost a decade since we first started teaching the Lean Methodology. It’s remade entrepreneurship education, startup practice and innovation in companies and the government. But in all that time, we haven’t gotten a large group of educators together to talk about what it’s been like to teach Lean or the impact it’s had in their classrooms and beyond. It dawned on us that with 10 years of Lessons Learned to explore, now would be a good time.

So, for the first time ever, we’re getting all educators from all these groups together for a “share best practices” summit at my ranch – December 4th – 5th.


100,000 students, one class at a time
A few months ago with the folks at VentureWell, the non-profit that puts on the Lean LaunchPad Educator classes  mentioned, “You know we’ve trained over 800 educators at hundreds of colleges and universities around the world to teach your class…” Say what???

It still seems like yesterday that Ann Miura-Ko and I were creating a new class – the Lean LaunchPad at Stanford to teach students an alternative to how to write a business plan.

If you can’t see the video click here

I quickly did the math. 800 educators – times 15 or so students per year – times almost ten years. Wow. It’s possible that 100,000 students have gone through some form of the class.

Add that to the 5,000 or more of our nation’s best science researchers who’ve gotten out the building (in this case their labs) who’ve gone through the National Science Foundation I-Corps program, (designed to help turn our country’s best academic research into companies), or the I-Corps @ the National Institute of Health or I-Corps @ the Department of Energy. And then add another 5,000 more who’ve gone through a version of I-Corps inside the Department of Defense.

It made me think about the variants of the class we’ve created. We started Hacking for Defense and Diplomacy almost four years ago. Hacking for Defense is now supported by the National Security Innovation Network and has put hundreds of students in 24 universities through the program. Hacking for Cities and Hacking for Non-profits have followed at U.C. Berkeley. Hacking for Oceans is coming next.

Yet none of these instructors across these disciplines have met. Or shared what they’ve learned.

So lets’ do it.

Educators Sharing Best Practices
On December 4th-5th, Jerry Engel, Pete Newell and I are hosting an event at the ranch for a select group of educators that have lead the Lean Innovation movement.

We’re going to cover:

  • The effectiveness of our programs [including I-Corps and Hacking for Defense]: What we have learned so far from the data and how to make it better
  • Customer Discovery and Lean Innovation in Academic Settings vs Non-Academic Settings such as incubators and accelerators
  • Tech Commercialization: innovators vs. entrepreneurs –  motivating scientists and engineers
  • Lean Innovation in the Enterprise, Not-for-Profit and Government – what’s different
  • International: Success and Challenges of Lean Innovation and Customer Discovery in  Europe and Asia [and South America? Australia?]
  • What’s next for Lean and entrepreneurial education
  • and much more…

Lessons Learned:

  • I’m hosting the Summit of Lean Innovation Educators at my ranch in December.
  • We’re bringing together a group to capture best practices and define a vision for what lies ahead.
  • Stay tuned for what we learn
  • And if you think you should be here, click here and let us know why

Mission Model Canvas – the Videos

In 2016 Pete Newell, Alexander Osterwalder and I developed the Mission Model Canvas for our Hacking for Defense Class.  We’ve now created a series of videos that explain how this variant of the Business Model Canvas works – 11 videos totaling 17 minutes.

Thanks to BMNT and the National Security Innovation Network for support of this project.

When Pete Newell, Joe Felter and I built the Hacking for Defense class we modeled the syllabus after my earlier Lean LaunchPad and NSF I-Corps classes. Both classes used Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas to frame the hypotheses to be tested.

If you can’t see the business model canvas video click here

However, using the business model canvas inside the Dept of Defense was problematical. Teams there pointed out that the standard business model canvas didn’t fit their problem sets. For example, in the Dept of Defense you don’t measure progress by measuring revenue. Instead 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.)

Therefore, the business model canvas box labeled Revenue Streams doesn’t make sense. The defense and intelligence community are mission-driven organizations so there is no revenue to measure. The first step in building a canvas that worked for these organizations was to change the Revenue Stream box to one that would provide a way to measure success.

We called this alternative- Mission Achievement/Success.

Now the Mission Model Canvas just needed four more tweaks.

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

Read the full blog post on the development and use of the Mission Model Canvas here.

And watch the Mission Model Canvas videos below.

If you can’t see the Introduction to the Mission Model Canvas video click here

If you can’t see the Beneficiaries and Stakeholders video click here

If you can’t see the Value Proposition video click here

If you can’t see the Buy-In video click here

If you can’t see the Deployment video click here

If you can’t see the Mission Achievement video click here

If you can’t see the Key Activities video click here

If you can’t see the Key Resources video click here

If you can’t see the Key Partners video click here

If you can’t see the Mission Budget video click here

If you can’t see the Key Concepts video click here

You can find the entire video series collected here

%d bloggers like this: