Almost every large company understands it needs to build an organization that deals with the ever-increasing external forces of continuous disruption, the need forcontinuous innovation, globalization and regulation. But there is no standard strategy and structure for creating corporate innovation. We outline the strategy problem in this post and will propose some specific organizational suggestions in follow-on … Continue reading »
business model versus business plan
2012 Lean LaunchPad presentations — Part 2 of 2
Today, the second half of the Stanford Engineering Lean LaunchPad Class gave their final presentations. Here are the final four (the first five are here.) Team ParkPoint Capital This team spoke face-to-face with 326 customers. As often happens, this team came into class convinced that their market research proved that their business was providing credit to underbanked customers. … Continue reading »
2012 Lean LaunchPad Presentations — Part 1 of 2
Today, the first half of the Stanford Engineering Lean LaunchPad Class gave their final presentations. Here are the first five. It Feels Like 20 Years Ago Today It’s hard to believe it’s only been a year since we taught the first 10 teams in the Stanford Lean LaunchPad class. To share what we learned, we blogged each of those class … Continue reading »
Search versus Execute
One of the confusing things to entrepreneurs, investors and educators is the relationship between customer development and business model design and business planning and execution. When does a new venture focus on customer development and business models? And when do business planning and execution come into play? Here’s an attempt to put this all in context. Don’t throw … Continue reading »
Killing your startup by listening to customers
The art of entrepreneurship and the science of customer development is not just getting out of the building and listening to prospective customers. It’s understandingwho to listen to and why. Five cups of coffee I got a call from Satish, one of my ex-students last week. He got my attention when he said, “following your customer development … Continue reading »
Scientists unleashed
Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not. — George Bernard Shaw We’re in the middle of our National Science Foundation Innovation Corps class – taking the most promising research projects in American university laboratories and teaching these scientists the basics of entrepreneurship. Our … Continue reading »
The Helsinki Spring
I spent the month of September lecturing, and interacting with (literally) thousands of entrepreneurs in two emerging startup markets, Finland and Russia. This is the first of two posts about Finland and entrepreneurship. —— I was invited to Finland as part of Stanford’s Engineering Technology Venture Program partnership with Aalto University. (Thanks to Kristo Ovaska and team for the … Continue reading »
How to build a web startup — Lean Launchpad Edition
As part of our Lean LaunchPad classes at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia and for theNational Science Foundation, students build a startup in 8 weeks using Business Model Design + Customer Development. One of the problems they run into is building a web site. ——— If you’re an experienced coder and user interface designer you think nothing is easier than … Continue reading »
Why governments don’t ‘get’ startups
Not understanding and agreeing what “Entrepreneur” and “Startup” mean can sink an entire country’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. ——— I’m getting ready to go overseas to teach, and I’ve spent the last week reviewing several countries’ ambitious attempts to kick-start entrepreneurship. After poring through stacks of reports, white papers and position papers, I’ve come to a couple of conclusions. … Continue reading »
It’s not how big it is — it’s how well it performs: The startup genome compass
What makes startups succeed or fail? More than 90% of startups fail, due primarily to self-destruction rather than competition. For the less than 10% of startups that do succeed, most encounter several near death experiences along the way. Simply put,while we now have some good theory, we just are not very good at creating startups … Continue reading »