The Big Bang. The Lean LaunchPad explodes at University of Maryland
Customer Development for Startups
Release Date: 12/10/2014
Customer Development for Startups
This is the fourth in a series about corporate innovation co-authored with . Evangelos and I are working on what we hope will become a book about the new model for corporate entrepreneurship. In our last post, we addressed the six key questions that senior management should address to determine if an Innovation Outpost makes sense for a company. If the answer is yes, here’s a step-by-step guide to help set one up.
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This is the second in a series about the changing models of corporate innovation co-authored with Evangelos Simoudis. Evangelos and I are working on what we hope will become a book about the new model for corporate entrepreneurship.
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I first met when he ran IBM’s Business Intelligence Solutions Division and then as CEO of his first startup Customer Analytics. Evangelos has spent the last 15 years as a Venture Capitalist, first at Apax Partners and later at Trident Capital. During the last three years he’s worked with over 100 companies, many of which established Innovation Outposts in Silicon Valley. He’s now helping companies get the most out of their relationships with Silicon Valley.
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In a recent workshop with a large company focused on the process, I mentioned that founders and intraprenuers operate more like artists than accountants – on day one they see something no one else does. One of the innovators in the room said, “It sounds like you’re describing exactly what the CEO of Pixar wrote in Creativity, Inc.”
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I’ve spent this year working with corporations and government agencies that are adopting and adapting . The biggest surprise for me was getting schooled on how extremely difficult it is to be an innovator inside a company of executors.
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is the Director of Innovation and runs the , which is working to foster innovation in the healthcare industry. He’s now run several and has seen a ton of healthcare startups. Here’s his advice for startups in this space.
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I’ve been working with large companies and the U.S. government to help them innovate faster– not just kind of fast, but 10x the number of initiatives in 1/5 the time. A 50x speedup kind of fast. Here’s how.
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Startups focus on speed since they are burning cash every day as they search for product/market fit. But over time code/hardware written/built to validate hypotheses and find early customers can become unwieldy, difficult to maintain and incapable of scaling. These shortcuts add up and become what is called . And the size of the problem increases with the success of the company.
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I’ve known from the University of Maryland as the Director of the (a collaboration among the University of Maryland, Virginia Tech, George Washington, and Johns Hopkins). But it wasn’t until seeing him lead the that I realized Edmund could teach my class better than I can.
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I am always surprised when critics complain that the Lean Startup’s Build, Measure, Learn approach is nothing more than “throwing incomplete products out of the building to see if they work.” Unfortunately the Build, Measure, Learn diagram is the cause of that confusion. At first glance it seems like a fire-ready-aim process.It’s time to update Build, Measure, Learn to what we now know is the best way to build Lean startups. Here’s how.
info_outlineThe University of Maryland is now integrating the Lean LaunchPad® into standard innovation and entrepreneurship courses across all 12 colleges within the University. Over 44 classes have embedded the business model canvas and/or Customer Discovery including a year-long course taken by every single one of its bioengineering majors. It’s made a big bang.