Collaboration in Practice: The Broad Relevance of the Lean LaunchPad Movement
A timeless framework for testing product/market fit is open to everyone.
The creators of the Lean LaunchPad movement have been doing this for a while. Steve Blank is a successful serial founder who launched his academic career and Lean LaunchPad class at UC Berkeley at the request of Jerry Engel, the founding Executive Director of Cal’s Lester Center of Entrepreneurship. A decade after its launch at Cal, Stanford, and Columbia, the Lean LaunchPad curriculum is taught across the globe at over 200 universities and many private and public accelerators.
The Lean LaunchPad method is an agile approach to business development focused on producing minimum viable offerings to solve customer needs in an iterative mechanism. It is about constantly listening to what customers want, need, and will pay for in a dynamic environment. What makes the strategy work is its emphasis on communication, collaboration, and the nonstop validation of product/market fit realized by agile execution.
A Lean LaunchPad class centers on a key business model framework (Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas) validated component by component by talking to hundreds of people. It is mind boggling that mature companies do not use this approach throughout their entire organizations. It could save what is left of the legacy retail sectors. Imagine mobilizing everyone to talk regularly to existing and potential customers to validate product/market fit and prove revenue models?
I recently had a chance to mentor at Stanford for three sessions of the Hacking 4 RecoveryLean LaunchPad. It was developed in the spirit of fostering innovative solutions for managing our pandemic’s global disruption. Each session was a 5-day creative crunch, a shortened version of the 11-week offering. I was immediately impressed that the program was free and open to the entire Stanford community. Other university based entrepreneurial initiatives should consider this level of inclusivity.
Freshmen, alumni, distinguished practitioners, and Ph.D. students from across Stanford’s faculties came together and innovated. Their teams had a clear purpose to solve real time sizeable problems. 200 people formed 50 teams spanning 6 continents and over a dozen countries. The startups they proposed are the vehicles for their insight and desired impact. Venture capitalists provided the founders guidance on what they and their peers in Silicon Valley expect to see for funding consideration.
The teaching team was very effective. It wasn’t just that the team was composed of really smart and personable people who are great problem solvers with a stellar record of innovation and successful startups. The key performance factor is that the team embraces what they teach. They are collaborative individuals who seek input from many people and take it to heart. I have seen incoming freshmen encouraged with the same respect as distinguished practitioners. Innovation is not bounded by the social constructs of age, gender, race, nationality, or any other demographic.
Intent on keeping the programming responsive and relevant in our new pandemic world, members of the teaching team put together a 400-person symposium of Lean LaunchPad educators. Practitioners from 200 universities representing 22 countries gathered virtually on July 24th for the Summer 2020 Lean Innovation Educators Summit to talk about lessons learned in the transition to virtual teaching. This is an ongoing struggle for educators everywhere.
The breakout sessions allowed everyone the opportunity to contribute their own observations. These impressions were summarized by the moderators and shared with the 400 attendees to stimulate best practices. That is the spirit of the Lean LaunchPad method, talking to many and internalizing lessons learned. It never stops.
Open collaboration stimulates the innovation we need to emerge from this global crisis with better structures and inclusivity of opportunity than before. Together, we will forge the change everyone deserves.
Thank you H4R Stanford Lean LaunchPad teaching team: Steve Blank, Steve Weinstein, Tom Bedecarré, Pete Newell, Tina Seelig, Todd Basche, Mar Hershenson, Heidi Roizen, Jerry Engel, TAs, and fellow mentors for a great experience. Everyone volunteered their time and all curriculum developed is open-sourced.