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Customer Development in Japan: a History Lesson

Steve Blank

I asked Tsutsumi-san to write a guest post for my blog to describe his experience with Customer Development in Japan. I discovered my product was a “nice to have,” not a “must have,” and we shut the company down a year a later. in a startup no facts exist inside the building, get out of the building to talk to customers”.

Japan 292
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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. This week we saw the results.

Incubator 301
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10,000 Startups – Startup Weekend Next

Steve Blank

The class teaches founders how to dramatically reduce their failure rate through the combination of business model design, customer development and agile development using the Startup Owners Manual. More importantly, it makes no demands of you to stand and deliver your weekly customer development progress in front of your peers.

Startup 335
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These Five Principles Will Accelerate Innovation

Steve Blank

They then incubated and delivered a solution that will help get large vessels back to sea faster, potentially saving the Navy $20M-$30M a year. A Navy team recently sourced 80 problems, then curated down to one priority problem to solve. In less than 60 days they created 26 MVPs while interviewing over two dozen companies.

Curation 344
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Why Real Learning is Outside the Building, Not Demo Day

Steve Blank

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. Given something tangible, customers were able to start gauging their willingness to use and pay.

Lean 315
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Lead and Disrupt

Steve Blank

Do they have better sales, marketing, or product development groups? What the winners start with is the realization that in a world of continuous disruption, they have only a few years to develop new capabilities or be pushed over the brink. Is it that some CEOs are better than others? Are their people smarter?

Incubator 402
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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).