Steve Blank

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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. government agency that supports research in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. billion U.S.

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Lead and Disrupt

Steve Blank

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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Nokia as “He Who Must Not Be Named” and the Helsinki Spring

Steve Blank

I was invited to Finland as part of Stanford’s Engineering Technology Venture Program partnership with Aalto University. Finland itself has significant engineering talent, and is also attracting entrepreneurs from Russia and the former USSR. Startup incubators, business angels and VCs are starting to emerge. Lessons Learned.

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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).

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Why Real Learning is Outside the Building, Not Demo Day

Steve Blank

We think teaching teams a formal methodology around the Lean Framework (Business Model design, Customer Development and Agile Engineering) is a natural evolution of how successful incubators/accelerators will build startups. Here’s the story of one such team; Jonathan Wylie, Lakshmi Shivalingaiah and the Evoke team.

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Hacking for Defense @ Stanford – Weeks 8 and 9

Steve Blank

But a decade earlier as undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, he was the father of the second offset strategy using software and semiconductors to build smart weapons, smart sensors, and stealth aircraft that helped end the Cold War. Second: I also gave the commencement speech at the NYU engineering school here.

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The Helsinki Spring

Steve Blank

—— I was invited to Finland as part of Stanford’s Engineering Technology Venture Program partnership with Aalto University. I suggested that they might want to consider putting themselves out of the public funding business by using public capital to kick-start private venture capital firms, incubators and accelerators.

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