My guests on Bay Area Ventures on Wharton Business Radio on Sirius XM Channel 111 were: Errol Arkilic, former program director for the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (NSF I-Corps), now founder of M34 Capital Steve Weinstein, CEO of MovieLabs Venk Shukla, president TiE Silicon Valley and general partner, Monta Vista Capital In my interview … Continue reading »
National Science Foundation
Why Translational Medicine Will Never be the Same
There have been 2 or 3 courses in my entire education that have changed the way I think. This is one of those. Hobart Harris Professor and Chief, Division of General Surgery at UCSF For the past three years the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps has been teaching our nations best scientists how to build a Lean Startup. … Continue reading »
Getting Lean in Education — By Getting Out of the Classroom
This week the National Science Foundation goes Lean on education by providing $1.2 million to educators who want to bring their classroom innovations to a wider audience. ——– The I-Corps programstarted when the U.S. National Science Foundation adopted my Lean LaunchPad class. Their goal was to train University scientists and researchers to use Lean Startup methods (business model design, … Continue reading »
I-Corps @ NIH – Pivoting the Curriculum
We’ve pivoted our Lean LaunchPad / I-Corps curriculum. We’re changing the order in which we teach the business model canvas and customer development to better-fit therapeutics, diagnostics and medical devices. — Over the last three years the Lean LaunchPad class has started to replace the last century’s “how to write a business plan” classes as the foundation for entrepreneurial … Continue reading »
Why Lean May Save Your Life – The I-Corps @ NIH
Today the National Institutes of Health announced they are offering my Lean LaunchPad class (I-Corps @ NIH ) to commercialize Life Science. There may come a day that one of these teams makes a drug, diagnostic or medical device that saves your life. —- Over the last two and a half years the National Science Foundation I-Corps has taught … Continue reading »
300 Teams in 2 Years
This is the start of the third year teaching teams of scientists (professors and their graduate students) in the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (I-Corps). This month we’ve crossed ~300 teams in the first two years through the program. I-Corps is the accelerator that helps scientists bridge the commercialization gap between their research in their labs and wide-scale commercial … Continue reading »
Blinded by the light — The epiphany
“Epiphany e·piph·a·ny noun /iˈpifənē/ : A moment of sudden revelation or insight.” We now know how to teach entrepreneurs how to think about business models and use customer development to turn hypotheses into facts. But there is no process to teach how to get an epiphany. We can only try to create the conditions where this might occur. It all just … Continue reading »
The government starts an incubator: The NSF Innovation Corps
Over the last two months the U.S. government has been running one of the most audacious experiments in entrepreneurship since World War II. They launched an incubator for the top scientists and engineers in the U.S. This week we saw the results. 63 scientists and engineers in 21 teams made 2,000 customer calls in 8 weeks, turning laboratory … 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 »
Eureka! A new era for scientists and engineers
Silicon Valley was born in an era of applied experimentation driven by scientists and engineers. It wasn’t pure research, but rather a culture of taking sufficient risks to get products to market through learning, discovery, iteration and execution. This approach would shape Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial ethos: In startups, failure was treated as experience (until you ran out of … Continue reading »