Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2018

Sloan put in place GM’s management accounting system (also borrowed from DuPont) that for the first time allowed the company to: 1) produce an annual operating forecast that compared each division’s forecast (revenue, costs, capital requirements and return on investment) with the company’s financial goals. Modern Corporation Marketing.

Michigan 268

Michigan Cofounder Stock Forecast 268

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2014

Agile Engineering” to have teams prototype, test, and iterate their idea while discovering if they have a profitable business model. Finally we move to the left side of the canvas to teach the supporting elements of Resources, Partners, Activities and Costs. I-Corps @ NIH Lecture Order Details.

Intellectual Property 281

Intellectual Property Lean IP Open Source 281

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2013

While our teams have mentors, socialize a lot and give great demos, the goal of our class final presentations is “ Lessons Learned ” – about product/market fit, pricing, acquisition/activation costs, pricing, partners, etc. Here’s the story of one such team; Jonathan Wylie, Lakshmi Shivalingaiah and the Evoke team.

Lean 315

Lean Customer Development Sales Cycle Business Model 315

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 11, 2022

My good friend Alexander Osterwalder , the inventor of the business model canvas (one of foundations of the Lean Methodology) has written a playbook (along with his associate partner Tendayi Viki ,) From Innovation Theater to Growth Engine to explain how to build and implement repeatable innovation processes inside a company. .

Portfolio 367

Portfolio Business Model Metrics Programming 367

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2014

Design Thinking is perfectly suited to situations where the process isn’t engineering-driven; time and money are abundant and the cost (and time) of a failure of a major project launch can be substantial.

Customer Development 335

Customer Development Design Developer Customer 335

Steve Blank

MARCH 8, 2011

We were going to toss teaching the business plan aside and try to teach engineering students a completely new approach to start companies – one which combines customer development, agile development, business models and pivots. Veritas is making a low cost, residential wind turbine.

Lean 298

Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 298

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 11, 2020

Google, at the time, was overhauling the back end of their search engine. They built their search engine 20 years ago. Bigger jets, bigger engines, bigger ships, as opposed to the small changes that can make an enormous difference. Which of these actions would impose the greatest cost on China if implemented?

Technical Review 322

Technical Review Taiwan Technology Design 322

Steve Blank

JANUARY 18, 2022

As the chief engineer of the Navy, he was the master of engineering the large and the complex. The system-to-system interactions to create these complex integrations drive up cost and manufacturing lead times. The Navy has world-class engineering and acquisition processes to deal with hardware.

Agile 369

Agile China Artificial Inteligence Taiwan 369

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 6, 2014

This year, at one of the universities where I teach in the engineering school, our quarter was going to start right after the New Year. Others complained that they had paid for plane tickets and it would cost them money to change, etc. Our first class session is definitely not a “meet and greet”.

Lean 278

Lean Customer Development Business Model Email 278

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 6, 2020

However, if we give them equipment that fails to keep up with the threat or state of the art, our warfighters bear a cost (ultimately with their lives) that they and the nation will pay. The first, the transition from buying a small number of exquisite systems versus large number of low-cost systems. They ended up buying 187.

Technology 397

Technology Afghanistan Iraq Vietnam 397

Steve Blank

AUGUST 23, 2010

Customer Development Without Agile Engineering Is A Plan For Failure. Beleving in Customer Development but still retaining waterfall development for engineering and manufacturing is a setup for problems if not outright failure. Solution : Get engineering buy-in by. Spend your Way to Success Usually Results in the Opposite.

Customer Development 235

Customer Development Developer Customer South America 235

Steve Blank

APRIL 4, 2011

Veritas , was the team building a low cost, residential wind turbine that average homeowners could afford. by modeling wind speed, energy costs, homeownership density and green energy incentives. And as engineers they believed weed versus crop recognition, while hard, was doable.

Customer 234

Customer Business Model Nebraska Cloud 234

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

Activities might include hardware or software development, mastering a 10,000 mile supply chain, low-cost manufacturing, or to provide services in a foreign country. Over the next two weeks, they’ll be drilling down on potential costs to deploy the solution – initial research indicates that the bracelets would cost $0.19

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

Activities might include hardware or software development, mastering a 10,000 mile supply chain, low-cost manufacturing, or to provide services in a foreign country. Over the next two weeks, they’ll be drilling down on potential costs to deploy the solution – initial research indicates that the bracelets would cost $0.19

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2015

Founders assumed they understood customer problems/needs, wrote engineering requirements documents, designed the product, implemented /built the hardware/software, verified that it worked by testing it, and then introduced the product to customers in a formal coming out called first customer ship. customer relationships to create demand.

Lean 120

Lean Agile Business Model Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 2, 2011

And they’ve being doing this while driving product cost down and performance up. (Their current initial markets for their batteries include telecom, utilities, transportation and Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) markets.) Corporate elephants can dance. They will build the sales team that follows.

Silicon Valley 222

Silicon Valley Agile Customer Development Early Stage 222

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

. … (Still) We had no idea the complexity that would be involved from sourcing the manufacturer and how long it would take once you found that manufacturer to be able to engineer the product… It’s very different when you’re engineering a product to make 100 of parts. …. Want to be a guest on the show?

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Ohio Columbus Entrepreneur 120

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 13, 2016

Companies are great at improving their existing business model and value propositions, but fall short when it comes to inventing entirely new business models, value propositions, and growth engines. That’s dangerous when it comes to developing new value propositions, business models, and growth engines.

Non-Compete 329

Non-Compete Agile Business Model San Francisco 329

Steve Blank

APRIL 19, 2023

Reorganize DoD Research and Engineering. that can make 1,000s of low-cost, attritable systems. Allocate its budget and resources equally between traditional sources of innovation and new commercial sources of innovation and capital. Split the OSD R&E organization in half. Coordinate with Allies.

Ukraine 273

Ukraine China Taiwan Russia 273

Steve Blank

JULY 22, 2013

(Drones were better than satellites because of higher resolution and the potential for making more passes over the fields, and better than airplanes because of lower cost.). Lean is Not an Engineering Process. There’s plenty of existence proofs that low cost drones can be equipped to carry cameras.) Keep Your Eyes on the Prize.

Product 335

Product Customer Development Forecast Engineer 335

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Computer hardware companies were faced with their customers asking for low-cost (relatively) desktop computers they had no experience in building. Their engineering teams didn’t have the expertise using off-the-shelf microprocessors (back then “real” computer companies designed their own instruction sets and operating systems.)

Technology 138

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

A month or two before the QuickTime public announcement in May, the SuperMac hardware engineers (who had a great relationship with the QuickTime team at Apple) started a “ skunk works ” project. In less than a month they designed a low-cost video-capture board that plugged into the Mac and allowed you to connect a video camera and VCR.

Video 164

Video Silicon Valley RSS California 164

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2015

To move innovation faster, we now have 21 st century tools — Business Model Canvas , Customer Development , Agile Engineering – all adding up to a Lean Startup. Innovation and improvement occurs in Horizon 1 on process, procedures, costs, etc. Lean is The Engine for the Ambidextrous Organization.

Lean 120

Lean Management Business Model Incubator 120

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 2, 2013

Kent Quirk was director of engineering at Playdom and director of engineering at Linden Labs. Cost-based Pricing versus Value-based Pricing. And they discovered that: device makers were spending $500-$800 in Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) to acquire a customer. A Five-sided Market. the Customer Life Time (CLT)).

Customer 323

Customer Churn Rate Customer Development Lean 323

Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

. —————- The next piece of the Secret History of Silicon Valley puzzle came together when Tom Byers , Tina Selig and Mark Leslie invited me to teach entrepreneurship in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program ( STVP ) in Stanford’s School of Engineering. My office is in the Terman Engineering Building.

Silicon Valley 180

Silicon Valley Technical Review Europe Germany 180

Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2016

The combination of the Business Model Canvas, Customer Development and Agile Engineering is an extremely efficient template for the students to follow. “Here’s what we thought, here’s what we did, here’s what we found, here’s what we are going to do next”.

Lean 120

Lean Incubator Business Model Channel 120

Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

Yet startup companies have traditionally used this model to manage and pace not only engineering but also non-engineering activities. The flaw in this thinking is that “first customer ship&# is simply the date when engineering thinks they “finished” the 1.0 release of the product.

Customer Development 238

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 238

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

The Army offered Fred Terman, the Dean of Engineering at Stanford, a $5M contract to build an electronics countermeasures lab. HP had an ethical culture, entrepreneurial spirit, and deep Stanford engineering department connections. The “customers’” contracts funded the company. Seven years later in 1971 ESL went public.

Silicon Valley 171

Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 171

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 20, 2011

By the early 1920’s General Motors realized that Ford, which was now selling the Model T for $290, had an unbeatable monopoly on low-cost automobile manufacturing. Even worse, the market was now filled with used cars that provided even lower cost basic transportation. Read part 1 of this post for background. Henry Ford hated the idea.

Jordan 300

Jordan Engineer Advertising Design 300

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 6, 2020

However, if we give them equipment that fails to keep up with the threat or state of the art, our warfighters bear a cost (ultimately with their lives) that they and the nation will pay. The first, the transition from buying a small number of exquisite systems versus large number of low-cost systems. They ended up buying 187.

Technology 133

Technology Afghanistan Iraq Vietnam 133

Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

Invention Risk - Click to Enlarge For companies building web-based products, product development may be difficult, but with enough time and iteration engineering will eventually converge on a solution and ship a functional product - i t’s engineering, not invention. The real risk in markets like Web 2.0

Vertical 144

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 144

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2016

In addition he conducts research with Dr. Hsueh Chia Chang in Chemical Engineering. from University of California, Davis in Biomedical Engineering. For his doctoral work, his research focused on liver tissue engineering and stem cell differentiation. in Structural Engineering from Stanford University in 2006.

Cofounder 190

Cofounder Entrepreneur Engineer California 190

Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

One of the things he mentioned was that when it came to decision-making he still tended to think and act like an engineer. Since every situation is unique, there is no perfect solution to any engineering, customer or competitor problem, and you shouldn’t agonize over trying to find one. The same is true in your company.

Silicon Valley 300

Silicon Valley RSS Startup Agile 300

Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2020

The classes are built on the Lean Startup methodology: Customer Discovery, Agile Engineering and the Business/Mission Model Canvas. Finally to have a better chance of a viable enterprise, they need to test all the other hypotheses in their business/mission model (pricing, demand creation, revenue, costs, etc.).

Customer 413

Customer Business Model Restful Video 413

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 25, 2014

Other than measuring engineering progress, there’s no standard language to communicate progress. For their final presentations, each team explained how they tested and validated their business model (value proposition, customer segment, channel, customer relationships, revenue, costs, activities, resources and partners.)

Incubator 310

Incubator Intellectual Property Startup Lean 310

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 20, 2013

The Knox team was a great mix of hands-on device engineers and business development. They used agile engineering perfectly to continually test variants of their Minimum Viable Product (MVP’s) in front of customers often and early to get immediate feedback. Alex DiNello CEO at Relievant Medsystems was their mentor.

Lean 241

Lean Customer Development IP Agile 241

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 10, 2009

The test for non-obvious is: given the prior art at the time of the invention, would a typical engineer 1) identify the problem, and 2) solve it with the invention? Each patent filing will cost your company $10-30k and take 1-4 years. Scientific principles or pure mathematical algorithms cannot be patented. In the U.S.

Intellectual Property 213

Intellectual Property IP Software Review Non-disclosure Agreement 213