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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.

Incubator 301
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How companies strangle innovation – and how you can get it right

Steve Blank

— I just watched a very smart company try to manage innovation by hiring a global consulting firm to offload engineering from “distractions.” This was a very large and established tech company; its engineering organization developed the core day-to-day capabilities of the organization. There’s a much better way.

Incubator 312
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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.

Incubator 402
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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. Filed under: Customer Development , Lean LaunchPad , Teaching.

Lean 315
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When It’s Darkest Men See the Stars

Steve Blank

In addition to super angels, incubators like Y Combinator , TechStars and the 100+ plus others worldwide like them have begun to formalize seed-investing. The emergence of incubators and super angels have dramatically expanded the sources of seed capital. These angels make lots of early bets and double-down when early results appear.

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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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A New Way to Teach Entrepreneurship – The Lean LaunchPad at Stanford: Class 1

Steve Blank

It was designed to bring together many of the new approaches to building a successful startup – customer development, agile development, business model generation and pivots. The first class was an introduction to the concepts of business model design and customer development. This post is part one.

Lean 298