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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. Today the U.C. Seeing Is Believing.

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How to Run a Productive Monthly Business Plan Review Meeting

Up and Running

This article, which originally appeared on our LivePlan Blog , is part of our “Business Planning Guide” —a curated list of our articles that will help you with the planning process! For us, business planning isn’t just a one-time or annual event. Most people think that meetings are a waste of time. They’re right.

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When Hell Froze Over – in the Harvard Business Review

Steve Blank

For decades this revered business magazine described management techniques that were developed in and were for large corporations – offering more efficient and creative ways to execute existing business models. ” It defined a startup as a “temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.”

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Search versus Execute

Steve Blank

One of the confusing things to entrepreneurs, investors and educators is the relationship between customer development and business model design and business planning and execution. When does a new venture focus on customer development and business models ? And when do business planning and execution come into play?

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The 47th (-46) International Business Model Competition

Steve Blank

We’ve been teaching that the difference between a startup and an existing company is that existing companies execute business models, while startups search for a business model. (Or Or more accurately, startups are a temporary organization designed to search for a scalable and repeatable business model.)

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Is the Lean Startup Dead?

Steve Blank

As a reminder, the Dot Com bubble was a five-year period from August 1995 (the Netscape IPO ) when there was a massive wave of experiments on the then-new internet, in commerce, entertainment, nascent social media, and search. Yet while we had plenty of language and tools for execution, we had none for search. The result?

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