Steve Blank, along with EECS Professor Kurt Keutzer, will offer this course in fall with the Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology. The program also fulfills the requirements of a Collider Project and counts towards Management of Technology Innovation Certificate Program for Graduate Students and Undergraduate Certificate Program in Entrepreneurship & Technology
Creating Startups in Berkeley Engineering with Lean Launchpad
Steve Blank
Banatao Auditorium, Sutardja Dai Hall
5PM, Tuesday, May 5, 2015
Please join us to hear Steve Blank talk about the method he created for quickly realizing the potential of novel technologies.
Abstract:
After eight start-ups, (two large craters (Rocket Science and Ardent), one dot.com bubble home run (E.piphany) and several base hits), Steve Blank turned his attention to teaching entrepreneurship. His book The Four Steps to the Epiphany launched the Lean Startup movement. His Lean Launchpad class has transformed how startups are built. In the Lean Launchpad methodology initial assumptions about the commercial viability of a startup are treated as “hypotheses” that needed to be tested with experiments. For a startup the data for these experiments are outside the lab and with potential customers. The class helps scientists and engineers finding the right fit between the value proposition of a novel product and the customer segments of a prospective market.
This approach was found to be so successful for turning new technologies into companies, that in 2011 the National Science Foundation adopted the Lean Launchpad as the curriculum for the NSF Innovation-Corps. All potential NSF SBIR grantees take a version of this class.
Steve’s Lean Launchpad approach has attracted the attention of many prestigious publications: Science, Nature, the Economist, Forbes, and the Harvard Business Review. In fact, an article in the Harvard Business Review listed Steve (together with Thomas Alva Edison!) as one of 11 “Master Innovators” of modern history, and Forbes named him as one of the 30 most influential people in tech.
While Steve teaches regularly in Stanford’s Technology Ventures Program and in Berkeley’s Haas MBA program, we are delighted to announce that Steve will be teaching his Lean Launchpad course this fall semester in Berkeley EECS (CS294-111). Steve will be joined by another regular Lean Launchpad instructor, Steve Weinstein, as well as Haas grad John Kramer, and EECS’s own Kurt Keutzer. Engineering undergraduates and especially Haas MBAs are also welcome to join teams of Berkeley engineers in this class that is focused on building start-ups focused on technological innovations. This fall class will require some pre-class preparation, and will only accommodate 32 students (8 teams of 4 students). So if you’re interested in joining the class in the fall, please attend this talk.
If you have questions please email Khalid Ashraf: kal.ashraf@gmail.com.