Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/201447
Lean LaunchPad Resources I Comprehensive information about Lean LaunchPad— including slides, videos, links, and other resources—can be found at steveblank.com. R ISE R /G ETTY I MAG ES I Information about the Lean LaunchPad Educators class can be found at steveblank.com/2013/06/18/the-lean-launchpadeducators-class/ and through the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA) at nciia.org/LLP. "What I didn't know was that personnel at NSF were reading each installment," he says. That's because administrators at NSF were looking for better ways of helping their funded scientists turn into profitable entrepreneurs, and they thought Lean LaunchPad might be the answer. "NSF-funded entrepreneurs weren't failing because they weren't great scientists with brilliant inventions," says Blank. "They were failing because they couldn't bridge that ditch of death in commercialization between getting the funding and translating the science into a company." The Lean LaunchPad's systematic method of testing hypotheses before moving forward had an intrinsic appeal to scientists who had spent their whole careers doing just that. "We're teaching them evidence-based entrepreneurship," says Blank. Blank taught the first NSF class at Stanford in 2011, with impressive results. "From day one, NSF insisted we do incoming and outgoing metrics on what the participants learned," says Blank. Because only some NSF teams were taking the first Lean LaunchPad course, the control groups were the teams that were just receiving traditional training. It turned out that teams that didn't take the class received outside funding at a rate of 18 percent. Those that did were funded at a rate of 60 percent. "If the class had been a failure, there would have been no difference in the numbers," says Blank. "But given these numbers, we can say that evidence-based entrepreneurship dramatically affects how we educate our entrepreneurs." I The MOOC called "How to Build a Startup: The Lean LaunchPad" is available from Udacity at www.udacity.com/ course/ep245. I Information about the National Science Foundation's I-Corps is at www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/i-corps/. I Details about UC Berkeley's Technology to Market Accelerator, which uses the Lean LaunchPad to teach startup elements to entrepreneurs worldwide, can be found at t2ma.org. The Accelerator is a partnership between the Intel Foundation and the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship at the Haas School. As NSF developed and expanded I-Corps, officials decided to make Lean LaunchPad an intrinsic part of the curriculum at all the nodes. To that end, Blank has created a two-and-a-half-day Lean LaunchPad Educators course to provide training for the faculty who will deliver it. In fact, his syllabus and slides are available for free online, and he has recorded all his Lean LaunchPad lectures as a MOOC so that any other university in the world can use them as well. That's because he's absolutely convinced that entrepreneurship is important for the health of the economy— and he knows commercialization is critical to entrepreneurship. "For the past 75 years, the U.S. has spent billions of dollars to fund science and engineering research as a federal policy," Blank says. "Yet, the commercialization of science is left to private capital—and venture capitalists generally follow fadbased investing. That giant sucking sound you hear is all the venture capital money going into social media, because the investors want quick returns. They don't want to wait ten years to make money on scientific investments. "So the real question is not 'Should the government be investing in startups?' but 'How can science-based startups be made more attractive to investors?'" he continues. "And the answer is, we need to reduce the risks of those commercialization opportunities. For that reason, I think the Lean LaunchPad class is important to the country." Reaping the Benefits I-Corps isn't just good for the country. It's good for the participating schools as well—at least, that's the case at Berkeley, where Lyons sees three distinct benefits to his school's involvement in the program. "We're taking what we've learned as an NSF I-Node and applying it to a pre-existing entrepreneurship program, which has made that program stronger. So one benefit is the spillover into other programs on campus," says Lyons. A second benefit is the knowledge that Haas faculty gain as they help deliver the program, and a third is the wealth of opportunities that crop up for students. "We might have grad students who are actually working on the BizEd November/December 2013 33