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Customer Development in Japan: a History Lesson

Steve Blank

The Japanese edition of The Startup Owner’s Manual hit the bookstores in Japan this week. I asked Tsutsumi-san to write a guest post for my blog to describe his experience with Customer Development in Japan. The result: great success of my third startup, a load balancing technology for web servers back in the late 1990’s.

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10,000 Startups – Startup Weekend Next

Steve Blank

Today we are announcing the biggest entrepreneurial program ever launched – Startup Weekend Next. A partnership of Startup Weekend , Startup America , TechStars and Udacity , Startup Weekend Next brings four weeks of amazing hands-on training learning to build your startup to cities around the world.

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The Government Starts an Incubator: The National Science Foundation Innovation Corps

Steve Blank

They launched an incubator for the top scientists and engineers in the U.S. 63 scientists and engineers in 21 teams made 2,000 customer calls in 8 weeks , turning laboratory ideas into formidable startups. The Innovation Corps – Using the Lean LaunchPad as an Incubator for Scientists and Engineers. The First Class.

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See More than 120 Speakers and Mentors at The Lean Startup Conference

Startup Lessons Learned

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference The Lean Startup Conference is next week--and now that we can step back and see all the speakers and mentors, we have to say: Wow. Ben Horowitz ’s book The Hard Thing About Hard Things is driving the conversation around startup management this year.

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Why Real Learning is Outside the Building, Not Demo Day

Steve Blank

Over the last three years our Lean LaunchPad / NSF Innovation Corps classes have been teaching hundreds of entrepreneurial teams a year how to build their startups by getting out of the building and testing their hypotheses behind their business model. The next customer segment we tried was startup founders.

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Lead and Disrupt

Steve Blank

You think startups are hard? These tools—Customer Development, Agile Engineering, and Business Model design—became the lean start-up methodology , a rigorous approach to testing hypotheses and building prototypes, and, on the basis of data and evidence, adjusting or pivoting to a variant of the original hypothesis.

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Qualcomm’s Corporate Entrepreneurship Program – Lessons Learned (Part 2)

Steve Blank

With hindsight we should have had “proof of concepts” tested in a corporate center (think ‘pop-up incubator’) where they would do extensive Customer Discovery. Eventually Qualcomm did create a corporate incubator to handle projects beyond the scope of traditional R&D, yet too early to hand-off to existing business unit).