Target Audience

High school, college and university students or product managers, innovation managers, project managers, general employees, decision makers tasked with growth and innovation, pre-incubation stage startups or business units.

Methodology

Learning Objectives:

The student will be able to apply the principles of customer development and business model generation to move from idea to validating product-market and problem-solution fit. He or she will be able to use a single-page business model canvas to convincingly present a business case. He or she will be able to effectively conduct customer interviews to validate the idea, followed up by building a simple Minimum Viable Product to start measuring and learning and finally prepared to pitch the findings and the business idea to accelerators, investors or internal stakeholders.

Overview:
The 1, 5 or 12 week program consists of 5 full, 5 half-day and 12 half-day classes respectively with approximately 2, 10 and 20h of hands-on homework between each weekly class. Mentors remain available online (e.g. Skype, mobile, email) to clarify issues that come up in between classes.

Flipped Classroom Approach:
To maximize learning the course uses a flipped classroom approach: short lectures outlining the core concepts during class & lots of self-study and practical, hands-on homework in between classes. Weekly 1/2 day meet-up: Half of the face-time is spent on deep exploration of the core topics a corporate entrepreneur needs to master. (e.g. the Business Model Canvas). The other half is used to peer- review the progress of each participant, mentoring and hands-on practical help with their business idea.

Homework:
Participants are expected to spend +8 hours per week outside class to get exposed to real market conditions and to talk to real potential customers for unfiltered input.

Outside work

- Video Lectures
- Written Material
- Customer Interviews

Meetups
- Discussions & Insights
- Lectures
- Accountability
- Feedback

Mentoring
- During Meetups
- Between Meetups

About Vidar Andersen

Mr. Andersen is a Norwegian entrepreneur and Internet industry veteran with over 18 years of professional experience working exclusively with F500 corporations and GOs, currently living in Cologne, Germany.

His work has been featured & recognized by The New York Times, The BBC, Business Insider, CNN, TechCrunch, Netzwertig, TechHustlers, TechCocktail, DViCE, BasicThinking, MLOVE, ZDF, UP Global, Global Week of Entrepreneurship, C’n’B, The European Pirate Summit, LeWeb Paris, London Web Summit, TechCocktail SxSW, Startup Weekend, Nordic Startup Awards, Maastricht Week of Entrepreneurship, StartupBus Europe, Monaco Media Forum, Deusto Business School University of Deusto & more.

He founds tech startups to solve problems, consult F100 enterprises on Corporate Entrepreneurship – Growth & Innovation, lectures on startup entrepreneurship at universities, keynotes entrepreneurial events globally and volunteers for the local Cologne startup ecosystem, organizing various groups and events.

He has lectured and taught at NEXT Cologne, BiTS Iserlohn, University of Cologne, Rheinische University of Applied Science Cologne, Knowmads Business University Amsterdam, Karlshochschule International University, NIT Northern Institute of Technology Management Hamburg, at creative agencies, TEDx and keynoted industry events & more.

In March 2014 he was invited to officially represent the state of NRW and Germany at SxSW in Austin, TX as an ambassador. He is also a GEAP scholarship recipient from the esteemed Deusto Business School in Bilbao, Spain and a winner of the Nordic Startup Awards 2012.

In 2013 he was named one of the top 5 must-know people in Germany by a leading technology publication and he was invited to Stanford to receive the Lean Launchpad Instructor certification by Steve Blank and to speak about the Cologne startup community to 100 international professors in entrepreneurship education. Today he teaches the experiential LLP entrepreneurship curriculum from Stanford and Berkeley to our European universities.

On arriving in Cologne, Germany in 2005, he headed the lead digital media agency to T-Mobile International / Deutsche Telekom for almost five years and was also responsible for the launch DMEXCO. For over nine years prior, he had worked with enterprises and GOs – the larges oil companies, publishers, energy providers and government – in Norway to solve their problems with software, creating many Internet industry-firsts.

In 2001 Mr. Andersen also co-founded the popular open source enterprise content management system Plone together with Alan Runyan and Alexander Limi. Users include NASA JPL, The CIA, The FBI, Lufthansa, eBay, Deutsche Telekom, The Government of Brazil, College University London, Yale University, Oxfam and many more.

In 1997, he founded his first company, blacktar.com, to help corporations solve problems with web technology.

 Talk to your potential customers and next talk to more of them

Leo is an expert on creating business opportunities by bringing domains together. He is the founder at westartup – a community of over 3,500 first-time entrepreneurs, co-founders, mentors and investors. As partner in HealthStartup, he organizes acceleration events for startups in healthcare and HackForHealth hackathons designed to create brand-new startups.

Leo is the founder, chief indoctrination officer, business architect, all-around marketing guy, business developer, product manager, copywriter and occasional janitor at westartup – a community of first-time entrepreneurs, co-founders, mentors and investors.

He’s also partner in Healthstartup, organizer of a series of events in Europe that bring together web and mobile entrepreneurs, healthcare professionals, policy makers and investors.  HealthStartup also tracks emerging trends in health-tech and builds an international network of healthcare experts and decision makers. Hack for Health brings together a group of enthusiastic software developers, healthcare professionals, designers and project managers for 2 days of intense collaboration on health-related challenges and datasets. It’s a very powerful, efficient and proven way to create innovative solutions to Flemish healthcare problems.

In addition to his work at westartup and HealthStartup, Leo is founder and co-organizer at Bizcamp Belgium.  He introduced Startup Weekend in Belgium, and co-organized four Startup Weekend events over the years.  He managed the Microsoft Innovation Center’s Boostcamp startup acceleration program and coached over 30 startups.  Last but not least, he created BetaInvest – a matchmaking service of BetaGroup that puts startups in direct contact with relevant investors.

Leo Exter holds an MBA in General Management from Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School (Belgium), and a Bachelor’s degree in Marketing from Valdosta State University (USA).  He speaks fluent English and Russian, and has a working knowledge of French.

Leo’s career began at The Coca-Cola Company, where he acquired an in-depth knowledge of Consumer Research in a variety of roles in Moscow and Brussels.  As a Product Manager at Info2clear – a small company in the sunset years of the dot-com boom he was for the first time exposed to the mysteries of product creation, and took that knowledge with him to his job as the Marketing Manager Europe for Mio Technology. In that role, Leo has created a new brand of portable GPS devices in Europeand led it to the 3^rd position in the highly competitive, dynamic market.  After Mio, Leo served as Managing Director at the Belgian branch of Trimedia, a Pan-European public relations consultancy. In this capacity Leo provided communications consultancy to clients as diverse as an oil company (LUKOIL), a media buying agency (Mediaedge), and a number of FMCG and Fashion clients.

Leo Exter – Westartup from Startups.be on Vimeo.

Give before you get!

Doug Ward is co-founder of Tech Britain, a resource that aims to promote all of the United Kingdom’s tech clusters and foster greater links between them. He is also a technology advisor to No.10 Downing Street as part of the UK Technology and Business Cluster Summit Group created and headed up by Joanna Shields (CEO of Tech City Investment Organisation), UK Ambassador for Digital Industries and an advisor to the University of Manchester innovation centre. Doug is a serial startup entrepreneur, and worked from Melbourne to Manchester. He has been speaking at events like FutureEverything and TEDx. He’s been interviewed by the Financial Times, The Guardian and ITV. He’s co-founder of Techhub Manchester and a firm believer in startup communities.

Go out there and meet the customer!

Vidar focuses on advising corporates and startups on improving entrepreneurial skills. He’s an certified Lean Launchpad trainer.

Mr. Andersen is a Norwegian entrepreneur and Internet industry veteran with over 18 years of professional experience working exclusively with F500 corporations and GOs, currently living in Cologne, Germany.

His work has been featured & recognized by The New York Times, The BBC, Business Insider, CNN, TechCrunch, Netzwertig, TechHustlers, TechCocktail, DViCE, BasicThinking, MLOVE, ZDF, UP Global, Global Week of Entrepreneurship, C’n’B, The European Pirate Summit, LeWeb Paris, London Web Summit, TechCocktail SxSW, Startup Weekend, Nordic Startup Awards, Maastricht Week of Entrepreneurship, StartupBus Europe, Monaco Media Forum, Deusto Business School University of Deusto & more.

He founds tech startups to solve problems, consult F100 enterprises on Corporate Entrepreneurship – Growth & Innovation, lectures on startup entrepreneurship at universities, keynotes entrepreneurial events globally and volunteers for the local Cologne startup ecosystem, organizing various groups and events.

He has lectured and taught at NEXT Cologne, BiTS Iserlohn, University of Cologne, Rheinische University of Applied Science Cologne, Knowmads Business University Amsterdam, Karlshochschule International University, NIT Northern Institute of Technology Management Hamburg, at creative agencies, TEDx and keynoted industry events & more.

In March 2014 he was invited to officially represent the state of NRW and Germany at SxSW in Austin, TX as an ambassador. He is also a GEAP scholarship recipient from the esteemed Deusto Business School in Bilbao, Spain and a winner of the Nordic Startup Awards 2012.

In 2013 he was named one of the top 5 must-know people in Germany by a leading technology publication and he was invited to Stanford to receive the Lean Launchpad Instructor certification by Steve Blank and to speak about the Cologne startup community to 100 international professors in entrepreneurship education. Today he teaches the experiential LLP entrepreneurship curriculum from Stanford and Berkeley to our European universities.

On arriving in Cologne, Germany in 2005, he headed the lead digital media agency to T-Mobile International / Deutsche Telekom for almost five years and was also responsible for the launch DMEXCO. For over nine years prior, he had worked with enterprises and GOs – the larges oil companies, publishers, energy providers and government – in Norway to solve their problems with software, creating many Internet industry-firsts.

In 2001 Mr. Andersen also co-founded the popular open source enterprise content management system Plone together with Alan Runyan and Alexander Limi. Users include NASA JPL, The CIA, The FBI, Lufthansa, eBay, Deutsche Telekom, The Government of Brazil, College University London, Yale University, Oxfam and many more.

In 1997, he founded his first company, blacktar.com, to help corporations solve problems with web technology.

♦

About the Lean Launchpad educational program

For the last decade, we’ve been teaching students how to write business plans. They were useful: 1) they provided a comprehensive way to help students envision the issues, 2) were a pedagogically simple paradigm, and 3) were what venture capitalists required. Yet time and again we watched as few of those plans survived first contact with customers. It took us some time until we recognized that business plans suffered from a fatal flaw: they assumed startups were just smaller versions of large companies. We now know that they’re not.

Before the Lean Startup Method started to take hold, conventional wisdom stated that the first thing a founder must do is create a business plan–a static document that with a series of implicit hypotheses describes the size of an opportunity, the problem to be solved, and the solution that the new venture will provide. Typically it includes a five-year forecast for revenue, profits, and cash flow.

A business plan is essentially a research exercise written in isolation at a desk before an entrepreneur has even begun to build a product. The implicit assumption is that it’s possible to figure out most of the unknowns of a business in advance, before you raise money and actually execute the idea.

The problem with this process is that tends to build an increasingly false sense of certainty, in an environment that is fundamentally uncertain. In this conventional model, once an entrepreneur with a convincing business plan obtains money from investors, he or she feels compelled to execute the plan as presented. He or she embarks on developing the product. Developers invest thousands of man-hours to prepare it for launch with little, if any, customer input. Only after the product is built and launched does the product get substantial feedback from customers–when the sales force attempts to sell it. And too often, after months or even years of development, entrepreneurs learn the hard way that customers do not need or want most of the product’s features.

After decades of watching thousands of startups follow this standard regimen, we’ve now learned at least three things:

1. As business plans are full of untested assumptions, they rarely survive first contact with customers. As the boxer Mike Tyson once said about his opponents’ prefight strategies: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

2. No one, aside from venture capitalists and the former Soviet Union, requires five-year plans to forecast a series of unknowns. These plans are generally fiction, and conceiving them is almost always a waste of time.

3. Startups are not smaller versions of large companies. They do not unfold in accordance with master plans. Those that ultimately succeed go quickly from failure to failure, all the while adapting, testing new iterations, and improving their initial ideas as they continually learn from customers.

Existing companies execute a business model, startups search for one. This distinction is at the heart of the Lean Startup approach. It shapes the lean definition of a startup: a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. The emphasis on search for a business model versus execution of a plan is at the heart of the Lean LaunchPad curriculum.

When first starting a new venture, the business model is unknown.1 It is a set of untested hypotheses. Startup teams’ key task is to test hypotheses, searching to verify the business model components; e.g., Customer Segments, Value Proposition, product features, channels,

Process: Customer and agile development to Product Management

Yet as powerful as the Business Model Canvas (a template with the nine blocks of a business model) is, at the end of the day it is a tool for identifying hypotheses without a

formal way of testing them. The Lean LaunchPad approach extends this process, providing a set of tools for testing hypotheses and enhancing the venture through experimentation and iteration.

The processes used to organize and implement the search for the business model are Customer Development and agile development. A search for a business model can occur in any new business–in a brand-new startup or in a new division of an existing company.

The Customer development model breaks out all the customer-related activities of an early- stage company into four easy to understand steps. The first two steps outline the “search” for the business model. Steps three and four “execute” the business model that’s been developed, tested, and proven in steps one and two. The steps:

- Customer Discovery first captures the founders’ vision and turns it into a series of business model hypotheses. Then it develops a plan to test customer reactions to those hypotheses and turn them into facts.

- Customer Validation tests whether the resulting business model is repeatable and scalable. If not, the team returns to Customer Discovery.

- Customer Creation is the beginning of execution. It builds end-user demand and drives it into the sales channel to scale the business.

- Company-building transitions the organization from a startup to a company focused on executing a validated model.

In the “search” steps, teams want a process designed to be dynamic, so they will work with a rough business model description knowing it will change. The business model changes because startups use Customer development to run experiments to test the hypotheses that make up the model (first testing their understanding of the customer problem, and then solutions). Most of the time, these experiments fail. Search embraces failure as a natural part of the startup process. Unlike existing companies that fire executives when they fail to match a plan, the Lean Startup keeps the founders and changes the model.

The Lean Startup: Key Principles

First, rather than engaging in months of planning and research, entrepreneurs accept that all they have on day one is a series of untested hypotheses–basically, good guesses. The foundation of the Lean Startup is evidence-based entrepreneurship. Instead of creating an intricate business plan, founders summarize their hypotheses in a framework called a Business Model Canvas. Essentially, this is a diagram of how a company will create value for itself and its customers.

Second, Lean Startups use a “get out of the building” approach called Customer development to test their hypotheses and collect evidence about whether they are true or false. They go out and ask potential users, purchasers, and partners for feedback on all elements of the business model, including product features, pricing, distribution channels, and affordable customer acquisition strategies. The emphasis is on nimbleness and speed; new ventures rapidly assemble minimum viable products (MVPs) and immediately elicit customer feedback. Then, using customers’ input to revise their assumptions, Lean Startups start the cycle over again, testing redesigned offerings and making further small adjustments (iterations) or more substantive ones (pivots) to ideas that aren’t working.

Third, Lean Startups practice something called agile development, which originated in the software industry. Agile development works hand-in-hand with Customer development. Unlike typical year-long product development cycles that presuppose knowledge of customers’ problems and product needs, agile development eliminates wasted time and resources by developing the product iteratively and incrementally. It’s the process by which startups create the minimum viable products they test.

Lessons Learned

- The search for the business model is the front end of the Lean Startup process.

- This is true in the smallest startup or largest company.

- The goal is to find a repeatable/scalable business model, and then execute. Agile and Customer Development are the processes used to search and build the model.

- Searching for the business model comes before executing it.

- Execution requires operating plans and financial forecasts.

- Product management is the process for executing the model.

- Entrepreneurial education is developing its own management stack:

- Starting with how to design and search for a business model and adding all the other skills startups need.

- The case method is the antitheses of experiential teaching,which is the core of the Lean Startup teaching method.