Steve Blank

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No One Wins In Business Plan Competitions

Steve Blank

Last week one of the schools I teach at invited me to judge a business plan contest. I suggested that they first might want to read my post on why business plans are a poor planning and execution tool for startups. At best I think business plan competitions are a waste of time.

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Blowing up the Business Plan at U.C. Berkeley Haas Business School

Steve Blank

Berkeley Haas Business School is a leader in entrepreneurship education. It has replaced how to write a business plan with hands-on Lean Startup methods. The final deliverable for that class was a 30-page business plan. We had multiple business plan competitions. The Business Plan is Dead.

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When Hell Froze Over – in the Harvard Business Review

Steve Blank

.” It defined a startup as a “temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.” Today its concepts of “minimum viable product,” “iterate and pivot”, “get out of the building,” and “no business plan survives first contact with customers,” have become part of the entrepreneurial lexicon.

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The 47th (-46) International Business Model Competition

Steve Blank

This startup search process is the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. When founders discover their assumptions are wrong, as they inevitably will, the result isn’t a crisis , it’s a learning event called a pivot — and an opportunity to update the business model.

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When Hell Froze Over – in the Harvard Business Review

Steve Blank

.” It defined a startup as a “temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.” Today its concepts of “minimum viable product,” “iterate and pivot”, “get out of the building,” and “no business plan survives first contact with customers,” have become part of the entrepreneurial lexicon.

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The Class That Changed the Way Entrepreneurship is Taught

Steve Blank

By the end of the 20th century, case studies and business plans had reached an evolutionary dead-end for entrepreneurs. The Rise of Business Schools – Management as an Occupation. The business school was invented in the first decade of the 20th century in response to a massive economic transformation in the U.S.

Lean 433
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The Lean LaunchPad Class: It’s the same, but different

Steve Blank

It’s hard to imagine, but only a decade ago, the capstone entrepreneurship class in most universities was how to write – or pitch- a business plan. In my experience, I saw that most business plans don’t survive first contact with customers. As a serial entrepreneur turned educator, this didn’t make sense to me.

Lean 248