Corporate/Gov't Innovation Archives - Product Management Confabulation

January 10, 2023

Be Where Your Business Is

This post previously appeared on the readwrite blog.

A CEO running a B-to-B startup in needs to live in the city where their business is – or else they’ll never scale.

I was having breakfast with Erin, an ex-student, just off a red-eye flight from New York. She’s built a 65-person startup selling enterprise software to the financial services industry. Erin had previously worked in New York for one of those companies and had a stellar reputation in the industry. As one would expect, with banks and hedge funds as customers, the majority were based in the New York metropolitan area.

Where Are Your Biggest Business Deals?
Looking a bit bleary-eyed, Erin explained, “Customers love our product, and I think we’ve found product/market fit. I personally sold the first big deals and hired the VP of sales who’s building the sales team in our New York office. They’re growing the number of accounts and the deal size, but it feels like we’re incrementally growing a small business, not heading for exponential growth. I know the opportunity is much bigger, but I can’t put my finger on what’s wrong.”

Erin continued, “My investors are starting to get impatient. They’re comparing us to another startup in our space that’s growing much faster. My VP of Sales and I are running as fast as we can, but I’ve been around long enough to know I might be the ex-CEO if we can’t scale.”

While Erin’s main sales office is in New York, next to her major prospects and customers, Erin’s company was headquartered in Silicon Valley, down the street from where we were having breakfast. During the Covid pandemic, most of her engineering team worked remotely. Her inside sales team (Sales Development and Business Development reps) used email, phone, social media and Zoom for prospecting and generating leads. At the same time, her account executives were able to use Zoom for sales calls and close and grow business virtually.

There’s a Pattern Here
Over breakfast, I listened to Erin describe what at first seemed like a series of disconnected events.

First, a new competitor started up. Initially, she wasn’t concerned as the competitor’s product had only a subset of the features that Erin’s company did. However, the competitor’s headquarters was based in New York, and their VP of Sales and CEO were now meeting face-to-face with customers, most of whom had returned to their offices. While Erin’s New York-based account execs were selling to the middle tier management of organizations, the CEO of her competitor had developed relationships with the exec staff of potential customers. She lamented, “We’ve lost a couple of deals because we were selling at the wrong level.”

Second, Erin’s VP of sales had just bought a condo in Miami to be next to her aging parents, so she was commuting to NY four days a week and managing the sales force from Miami when she wasn’t in New York. Erin sighed, “She’s as exhausted as I am flying up and down the East Coast.”

Third, Erin’s account execs were running into the typical organizational speedbumps and roadblocks that closing big deals often encounter. However, solving them via email, Zoom and once-a-month fly-in meetings wasn’t the same as the NY account execs being able to say, “Hey, our VP of Sales and CEO are just down the street. Can we all grab a quick coffee and talk this over?” Issues that could have been solved casually and quickly ballooned into ones that took more work and sometimes a plane trip for her VP of Sales or Erin to solve.

By the time we had finished breakfast it was clear to me that Erin was the one putting obstacles in front of her path to scale. Here’s what I observed and suggested.

Keep Your Eye on The Prize
While Erin had sold the first deals herself, she needed to consider whether each deal happened because as CEO, she could call on the company’s engineers to pivot the product. Were the account execs in New York trying to execute a sales model that wasn’t yet repeatable and scalable without the founder’s intervention? Had a repeatable and scalable sales process truly been validated? Or did each sale require a heroic effort?

Next, setting up their New York office without Erin or her VP of Sales physically living in New York might have worked during Covid but was now holding her company back. At this phase of her company the goal of the office shouldn’t be to add new accounts incrementally – but should be how to scale – repeatably. Hiring account execs in an office in New York let Erin believe that she had a tested, validated, and repeatable sales playbook that could rapidly scale the business. The reality was that without her and the VP of Sales living and breathing the business in New York, they were trying to scale a startup remotely.

Her early customers told Erin that her company had built a series of truly disruptive financial service products. But now, the company was in a different phase – it needed to build and grow the business exponentially. And in this phase, her focus as a CEO needed to change – from searching for product/market fit to driving exponential growth.

Exponential Growth Requires Relentless Execution
Because most of her company’s customers were concentrated in a single city, Erin and her VP of Sales needed to be there – not visiting in a hotel room. I suggested that:

Erin had to quickly decide if she wanted to be the one to scale the business. If not, her investors were going to find someone who could.
If so, she needed to realize that she had missed an important transition in her company. In a high-dollar B-to-B business, building and scaling sales can’t be done remotely. And she was losing ground every day. Her New York office needed a footprint larger than she was. It needed business development and marketing people rapidly creating demand.
Her VP of Sales might be wonderful, but with the all the travel the company is only getting her half-time. Erin needs a full-time head of sales in New York. Time to have a difficult conversation.
Because she was behind, Erin needed to rent an apartment in New York for a year, and spend the next six months there and at least two weeks a month after that. Her goal was to:
- 1) Validate that there was a repeatable sales process. It not, build one
- 2) Build a New York office that could create a sales and marketing footprint without her presence. Only then could she cut back her time in the City.
Finally, she needed to consider that if her customers were primarily in New York and the engineers were working remotely, why weren’t the company headquarters in New York?

I Hate New York
As we dug into these issues, I was pretty surprised to hear her say, “I spent a big part of my career in New York. I thought coming out to Stanford and the West Coast meant I could leave the bureaucracy of large companies and that culture behind. Covid let me do that for a few years. I guess now I’m just avoiding jumping back into an environment I thought I had left.”

We lingered over coffee as I suggested it was time for her to take stock of what’s next. She had something rare – a services company that provided real value with products that early customers loved. Her staff didn’t think they were joining a small business, neither did her investors. If she wasn’t prepared to build something to its potential, what was her next move?

Lessons Learned

For a startup, the next step after finding product/market fit is finding a repeatable and scalable sales process

This requires a transition to the relentless execution of creating demand and exponentially growing sales

If your customers are concentrated in a city or region, you need to be where your customers are

The CEO needs to lead this growth focus

And then hand it off to a team equally capable and committed

November 11, 2022

The Three Pillars of World-class Corporate Innovation

My good friend Alexander Osterwalder, the inventor of the business model canvas (one of foundations of the Lean Methodology) has written a playbook (along with his associate partner Tendayi Viki,) From Innovation Theater to Growth Engine to explain how to build and implement repeatable innovation processes inside a company.

Here’s their introduction to the key concepts inside the playbook.

Over 75% of executives report that innovation is a top three priority at their companies. However, only 20% of executives indicate that their companies are ready to innovate at scale. This is the challenge for contemporary organizations: How to develop a world-class ecosystem that can drive repeatable innovation at scale.

The playbook describes the three pillars of corporate innovation: Innovation Portfolios, Innovation Programs and a Culture of Innovation. Under each pillar, the playbook describes three questions that leaders and teams can ask to evaluate whether their company has the right innovation ecosystem in place.

Innovation Portfolio: what are your company’s portfolio of innovation projects?

Are your company’s innovation efforts exploring or exploiting business modes?
Does your company have a balanced portfolio of projects that cover efficiency, sustaining and transformative innovation?
What is the health of your innovation funnel or pipeline?

Explore: Search for new value propositions and business models by designing and testing new business ideas rather than execution.

Exploit: Manage existing business models by scaling emerging businesses, renovating declining ones and protecting the successful ones.

Innovation Programs: how are your company’s innovation programs are structured and managed.

Do your leaders get excited about the wrong innovation programs?
What results are your innovation programs producing?
Are your company’s innovation programs interconnected in a strategic way?

To close the innovation capability gap, companies can evaluate their innovation programs by asking whether they’reinnovation theater or producing tangible results for the company.

Value Creation: Creating new products, services, value propositions and business models. These programs invest in and manage innovation projects that create value by producing new growth or cost savings.

Culture Change: Transforming the company to establish an innovation culture. This may include new processes, metrics, incentive systems, or changing organizational structures. These transformations help the company innovate in a consistent and repeatable way.

Innovation Culture: What are the blockers and enablers of innovation in your company –

How much time does your leadership spend on innovation?
Where does innovation live in your organization and how much power does it have?
What is your kill rate for innovation projects?

To overcome the innovation capability gap, companies need to create a culture that enables the right behaviors to produce world-class innovative outcomes. A reliable indicator of the quality of your innovation culture is how innovation teams would describe it. Is it a culture that is dominated by blockers of innovation or enablers of innovation?

Leadership Support: How can corporate leaders have the biggest impact on innovation in terms of time spent, strategic guidance, and resource allocation.

Organizational Design: How to give innovation legitimacy and power, the right incentives, and clear policies for collaboration with the core business.

Innovation Practice: How to develop people’s innovation skills and experience and acquire the right innovation talent. How to ensure that we are using the right tools, processes, and metrics to test and adapt ideas in order to reduce risk.

Lessons Learned

The three pillars of an innovation ecosystem:

Innovation Portfolios

Innovation Programs

a Culture of Innovation

Download the Osterwalder Playbook here

October 25, 2022

A Simple Map for Innovation at Scale

An edited version of this article previously appeared in the Boston Consulting Group’s strategy think tank website.

I spent last week at a global Fortune 50 company offsite watching them grapple with disruption. This 100+-year-old company has seven major product divisions, each with hundreds of products. Currently a market leader, they’re watching a new and relentless competitor with more money, more people and more advanced technology appear seemingly out of nowhere, attempting to grab customers and gain market share.

This company was so serious about dealing with this threat (they described it as “existential to their survival”) that they had mobilized the entire corporation to come up with new solutions. This wasn’t a small undertaking, because the threats were coming from multiple areas in multiple dimensions; How do they embrace new technologies? How do they convert existing manufacturing plants (and their workforce) for a completely new set of technologies? How do they bring on new supply chains? How do they become present on new social media and communications channels? How do they connect with a new generation of customers who had no brand loyalty? How to they use the new distribution channels competitors have adopted? How do they make these transitions without alienating and losing their existing customers, distribution channels and partners? And how do they motivate their most important asset – their people – to operate with speed, urgency, and passion?

The company believed they had a handful of years to solve these problems before their decline would become irreversible. This meeting was a biannual gathering of all the leadership involved in the corporate-wide initiatives to out-innovate their new disruptors. They called it the “Tsunami Initiative” to emphasize they were fighting the tidal wave of creative destruction engulfing their industry.

To succeed they realized this isn’t simply coming up with one new product. It meant pivoting an entire company – and its culture. The scale of solutions needed dwarf anything a single startup would be working on.

The company had hired a leading management consulting firm that helped them select 15 critical areas of change the Tsunami Initiative was tasked to work on. My hosts, John and Avika, at the offsite were the co-leads overseeing the 15 topic areas. The consulting firm suggested that they organize these 15 topic areas as a matrix organization, and the ballroom was filled with several hundred people from across their company – action groups and subgroups with people from across the company: engineering, manufacturing, market analysis and collection, distribution channels, and sales. Some of the teams even included some of their close partners. Over a thousand more were working on the projects in offices scattered across the globe.

John and Avika had invited me to look at their innovation process and offer some suggestions.

Are these the real problems?
This was one of the best organized innovation initiatives I have seen. All 15 topic had team leads presenting poster sessions, there were presenters from the field sales and partners emphasizing the urgency and specificity of the problems, and there were breakout sessions where the topic area teams brainstormed with each other. After the end of the day people gathered around the firepit for informal conversations. It was a testament to John and Avika’s leadership that even off duty people were passionately debating how to solve these problems. It was an amazing display of organizational esprit de corps.

While the subject of each of the 15 topic areas had been suggested by the consulting firm, it was in conjunction with the company’s corporate strategy group, and the people who generated these topic area requirements were part of the offsite. Not only were the requirements people in attendance but so was a transition team to facilitate the delivery of the products from these topic teams into production and sales.

However, I noticed that several of the requirements from corporate strategy seemed to be priorities given to them from others (e.g. here are the problems the CFO or CEO or board thinks we ought to work on) or likely here are the topics the consulting firm thought they should focus on) and/or were from subject matter experts (e.g. I’m the expert in this field. No need to talk to anyone else; here’s what we need). It appeared the corporate strategy group was delivering problems as fixed requirements, e.g. deliver these specific features and functions the solution ought to provide.

Here was a major effort involving lots of people but missing the chance to get the root cause of the problems.

I told John and Avika that I understood some requirements were known and immutable. However, when all of the requirements are handed to the action teams this way the assumption is that the problems have been validated, and the teams do not need to do any further exploration of the problem space themselves.

Those tight bounds on requirements constrain the ability of the topic area action teams to:

Deeply understand the problems – who are the customers, internal stakeholders (sales, other departments) and beneficiaries (shareholders, etc.)? How to adjudicate between them, priority of the solution, timing of the solutions, minimum feature set, dependencies, etc.
Figure out whether the problem is a symptom of something more important
Understand whether the problem is immediately solvable, requires multiple minimum viable products to test several solutions, or needs more R&D

I noticed that with all of the requirements fixed upfront, instead of having a freedom to innovate, the topic area action teams had become extensions of existing product development groups. They were getting trapped into existing mindsets and were likely producing far less than they were capable of. This is a common mistake corporate innovation teams tend to make.

I reminded them that when team members get out of their buildings and comfort zones, and directly talk to, observe, and interact with the customers, stakeholders and beneficiaries, it allows them to be agile, and the solutions they deliver will be needed, timely, relevant and take less time and resources to develop. It’s the difference between admiring a problem and solving one.

As I mentioned this, I realized having all fixed requirements is a symptom of something else more interesting – how the topic leads and team members were organized. From where I sat, it seemed there was a lack of a common framework and process.

Give the Topic Areas a Common Framework
I asked John and Avika if they had considered offering the topic action team leaders and their team members a simple conceptual framework (one picture) and common language. I suggested this would allow the teams to know when and how to “ideate” and incorporate innovative ideas that accelerate better outcomes. The framework would use the initial corporate strategy requirements as a starting point rather than a fixed destination. See the diagram.

I drew them a simple chart and explained that most problems start in the bottom right box.

These are “unvalidated” problems. Teams would use a customer discovery process to validate them. (At times some problems might require more R&D before they can be solved.) Once the problems are validated, teams move to the box on the bottom left and explore multiple solutions. Both boxes on the bottom are where ideation and innovation-type of problem/solution brainstorming are critical. At times this can be accelerated by bringing in the horizon 3, out-of-the-box thinkers that every company has, and let them lend their critical eye to the problem/solution.

If a solution is found and solves the problem, the team heads up to the box on the top left.

But I explained that very often the solution is unknown. In that case think about having the teams do a “technical terrain walk.” This is the process of describing the problem to multiple sources (vendors, internal developers, other internal programs) debriefing on the sum of what was found. A terrain walk often discovers that the problem is actually a symptom of another problem or that the sources see it as a different version of the problem. Or that an existing solution already exists or can be modified to fit.

But often, no existing solution exists. In this case, teams could head to the box on the top right and build Minimal Viable Products – the smallest feature set to test with customers and partners. This MVP testing often results in new learnings from the customers, beneficiaries, and stakeholders – for example, they may tell the topic developer that the first 20% of the deliverable is “good enough” or the problem has changed, or the timing has changed, or it needs to be compatible with something else, etc. Finally, when a solution is wanted by customers/beneficiaries/stakeholders and is technically feasible, then the teams move to the box on the top left.

The result of this would be teams rapidly iterating to deliver solutions wanted and needed by customers within the limited time the company had left.

Creative destruction
Those companies that make it do so with an integrated effort of inspired and visionary leadership, motivated people, innovative products, and relentless execution and passion.

Watching and listening to hundreds of people fighting the tsunami in a legendary company was humbling.

I hope they make it.

Lessons Learned

Creative destruction and disruption will happen to every company. How will you respond?

Topic action teams need to deeply understand the problems as the customer understands them, not just what the corporate strategy requirements dictate

This can’t be done without talking directly to the customers, internal stakeholders, and partners

Consider if the corporate strategy team should be more facilitators than gatekeepers

A light-weight way to keep topic teams in sync with corporate strategy is to offer a common innovation language and problem and solution framework

June 20, 2022

Finding and Growing the Islands of Innovation inside a large company – Action Plan for A New CTO

This post previously appeared in Fast Company.

How does a newly hired Chief Technology Officer (CTO) find and grow the islands of innovation inside a large company?

How not to waste your first six months as a new CTO thinking you’re making progress when the status quo is working to keep you at bay?

I just had coffee with Anthony, a friend who was just hired as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of a large company (30,000+ people.) He previously cofounded several enterprise software startups, and his previous job was building a new innovation organization from scratch inside another large company. But this is the first time he was the CTO of a company this size.

Good News and Bad
His good news was that his new company provides essential services and regardless of how much they stumbled they were going to be in business for a long time. But the bad news was that the company wasn’t keeping up with new technologies and new competitors who were moving faster. And the fact that they were an essential service made the internal cultural obstacles for change and innovation that much harder.

We both laughed when he shared that the senior execs told him that all the existing processes and policies were working just fine. It was clear that at least two of the four divisions didn’t really want him there. Some groups think he’s going to muck with their empires. Some of the groups are dysfunctional. Some are, as he said, “world-class people and organizations for a world that no longer exists.”

So the question we were pondering was, how do you quickly infiltrate a large, complex company of that size? How do you put wins on the board and get a coalition working? Perhaps by getting people to agree to common problems and strategies? And/or finding the existing organizational islands of innovation that were already delivering and help them scale?

The Journey Begins
In his first week the exec staff had pointed him to the existing corporate incubator. Anthony had long come to the same conclusion I had, that highly visible corporate incubators do a good job of shaping culture and getting great press, but most often their biggest products were demos that never get deployed to the field. Anthony concluded that the incubator in his new company was no exception. Successful organizations recognize that innovation isn’t a single activity (incubators, accelerators, hackathons); it is a strategically organized end-to-end process from idea to deployment.

In addition, he was already discovering that almost every division and function was building groups for innovation, incubation and technology scouting. Yet no one had a single road map for who was doing what across the enterprise. And more importantly it wasn’t clear which, if any, of those groups were actually continuously delivering products and services at high speed. His first job was to build a map of all those activities.

Innovation Heroes are Not Repeatable or Scalable
Over coffee Anthony offered that in a company this size he knew he would find “innovation heroes” – the individuals others in the company point to who single-handedly fought the system and got a new product, project or service delivered (see article here.) But if that was all his company had, his work was going to be much tougher than he thought, as innovation heroics as the sole source of deployment of new capabilities are a sign of a dysfunctional organization.

Anthony believed one of his roles as CTO was to:

Map and evaluate all the innovation, incubation and technology scouting activities
Help the company understand they need innovation and execution to occur simultaneously. (This is the concept of an ambidextrous organization (seethis HBR article).)
Educate the company that innovation and execution have different processes, people, and culture. They need each other – and need to respect and depend on each other
Create an innovation pipeline – from problem to deployment – and get it adopted at scale

Anthony was hoping that somewhere three, four or five levels down the organization were the real centers of innovation, where existing departments/groups – not individuals – were already accelerating mission/delivering innovative products/services at high speed. His challenge was to

find these islands of innovation and who was running them and understand if/how they

Leveraged existing company competencies and assets
Understand if/how they co-opted/bypassed existing processes and procedures
Had a continuous customer discovery to create products that customers need and want
Figured out how to deliver with speed and urgency
And if they somehow had made this a repeatable process

If these groups existed, his job as CTO was to take their learning and:

Figure out what barriers the innovation groups were running into and help build innovation processes in parallel to those for execution
Use their work to create a common language and tools for innovation around rapid acceleration of existing mission and delivery
Make permanent delivering products and services at speed with a written innovation doctrine and policy
Instrument the process with metrics and diagnostics

Get out of the office
So with another cup of coffee the question we were trying to answer was, how does a newly hired CTO find the real islands of innovation in a company his size?

A first place to start was with the innovation heroes/rebels. They often know where all the innovation bodies were buried. But Anthony’s insight was he needed to get out of his 8^th floor office and spend time where his company’s products and services were being developed and delivered.

It was likely that most innovative groups were not simply talking about innovation, but were the ones who rapidly delivering innovative solutions to customer’s needs.

One Last Thing
As we were finishing my coffee Anthony said, “I’m going to let a few of the execs know I’m not out for turf because I only intend to be here for a few years.” I almost spit out the rest of my coffee. I asked how many years the division C-level staff has been at the company. “Some of them for decades” he replied. I pointed out that in a large organization saying you’re just “visiting” will set you up for failure, as the executives who have made the company their career will simply wait you out.

As he left, he looked at a bit more concerned than we started. “Looks like I have my work cut out for me.”

Lessons Learned

Large companies often have divisions and functions with innovation, incubation and technology scouting all operating independently with no common language or tools

Innovation heroics as the sole source of deployment of new capabilities are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

Innovation isn’t a single activity (incubators, accelerators, hackathons); it is a strategically organized end-to-end process from idea to deployment

Somewhere three, four or five levels down the organization are the real centers of innovation – accelerating mission/delivering innovative products/services at high speed

The CTO’s job is to:

create a common process, language and tools for innovation

make them permanent with a written innovation doctrine and policy

And don’t ever tell anyone you’re a “short timer”

June 20, 2022

Finding and Growing the Islands of Innovation inside a large company – Action Plan for A New CTO

This post previously appeared in Fast Company.

How does a newly hired Chief Technology Officer (CTO) find and grow the islands of innovation inside a large company?

How not to waste your first six months as a new CTO thinking you’re making progress when the status quo is working to keep you at bay?

Anthony believed one of his roles as CTO was to:

Map and evaluate all the innovation, incubation and technology scouting activities
Help the company understand they need innovation and execution to occur simultaneously. (This is the concept of an ambidextrous organization (seethis HBR article).)
Educate the company that innovation and execution have different processes, people, and culture. They need each other – and need to respect and depend on each other
Create an innovation pipeline – from problem to deployment – and get it adopted at scale

find these islands of innovation and who was running them and understand if/how they

Leveraged existing company competencies and assets
Understand if/how they co-opted/bypassed existing processes and procedures
Had a continuous customer discovery to create products that customers need and want
Figured out how to deliver with speed and urgency
And if they somehow had made this a repeatable process

If these groups existed, his job as CTO was to take their learning and:

Figure out what barriers the innovation groups were running into and help build innovation processes in parallel to those for execution
Use their work to create a common language and tools for innovation around rapid acceleration of existing mission and delivery
Make permanent delivering products and services at speed with a written innovation doctrine and policy
Instrument the process with metrics and diagnostics

Get out of the office
So with another cup of coffee the question we were trying to answer was, how does a newly hired CTO find the real islands of innovation in a company his size?

It was likely that most innovative groups were not simply talking about innovation, but were the ones who rapidly delivering innovative solutions to customer’s needs.

As he left, he looked at a bit more concerned than we started. “Looks like I have my work cut out for me.”

Lessons Learned

Large companies often have divisions and functions with innovation, incubation and technology scouting all operating independently with no common language or tools

Innovation heroics as the sole source of deployment of new capabilities are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

Innovation isn’t a single activity (incubators, accelerators, hackathons); it is a strategically organized end-to-end process from idea to deployment

Somewhere three, four or five levels down the organization are the real centers of innovation – accelerating mission/delivering innovative products/services at high speed

The CTO’s job is to:

create a common process, language and tools for innovation

make them permanent with a written innovation doctrine and policy

And don’t ever tell anyone you’re a “short timer”

September 10, 2020

Technology, Innovation, and Modern War

I’m teaching my first non-lean start up class in a decade at Stanford next week; Technology, Innovation and Modern War: Keeping America’s Edge in an Era of Great Power Competition. The class is joint listed in Stanford’s International Policy department as well as in the Engineering School, in the department of Management Science and Engineering.

—

Why This Course?

Five years ago, Joe Felter, Pete Newell and I realized that few of our students considered careers in the Department of Defense or Intelligence Community. In response we developed the Hacking for Defense class where students could learn about the nation’s emerging threats and security challenges while working with innovators inside the Department of Defense (DoD) and Intelligence Community to solve real national security problems. Today there is a national network of 40 colleges and universities teaching Hacking for Defense. We’ve created a network of entrepreneurial students who understand the security threats facing the country and engaged them in partnership with islands of innovation in the DOD/IC. The output of these classes is providing hundreds of solutions to critical national security problems every year. This was our first step in fostering a more agile, responsive and resilient, approach to national security in the 21st century.

Fast forward to today. For the first time since the start of the Cold War, Americans face the prospect of being unable to win in a future conflict. In 2017, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff gave a prescient warning that “In just a few years, if we do not change the trajectory, we will lose our qualitative and quantitative competitive advantage.” Those few years are now, and this warning is coming to fruition.

New emerging technologies will radically change how countries will be able to fight and deter threats across air, land, sea, space, and cyber. But winning future conflicts requires more than just adopting new technology; it requires a revolution in thinking about how this technology can be integrated into weapons systems to drive new operational and organizational concepts that change the way we fight.

Early in 2020, Joe Felter (previously Assistant Secretary of Defense for South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania and Hacking for Defense co-creator) and I began to talk about the need for a new class that gave students an overview of the new technologies and explored how new technologies turn into weapons, and how new concepts to use them will emerge. We recruited Raj Shah (previously the managing director of the Defense Innovation Unit that was responsible for contracting with commercial companies to solve national security problems) and we started designing the class. One couldn’t hope for a better set of co-instructors.

The Class
War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man. Ever since someone picked up a rock and realized you could throw it, humans have embraced new technology for war. Each new generation of technology (spears, bows and arrows, guns, planes, etc.) inevitably created new types of military systems. But just picking up the rock didn’t win a conflict, it required the development of a new operational concept learning how to use it to win, i.e. what was the best way to throw a rock, how many people needed to throw rocks, the timing of when you threw it, etc. As each new technology created new military systems, new operational concepts were developed (bows and arrows were used differently than rocks, etc.). Our course will examine the new operational concepts and strategies that will emerge from 21st century technologies – Space, Cyber, AI & Machine Learning and Autonomy. We’ll describe how new military systems are acquired, funded, and fielded, and also consider the roles of Congress, incumbent contractors, lobbyists, and start-ups.

This course begins with an overview of the history of military innovation then describes the U.S. strategies developed since World War II to gain and maintain our technological competitive edge during the bipolar standoff of the Cold War. Next, we’ll discuss the challenge of our National Defense Strategy – we no longer face a single Cold War adversary but potentially five – in what are called the “2+3 threats” (China and Russia plus Iran, North Korea, and non-nation state actors.)

The course offers students the insight that for hundreds of years, innovation in military systems has followed a repeatable pattern: technology innovation > new weapons > experimentation with new weapons/operational concepts > pushback from incumbents > first use of new operational concepts.

In the second part of course, we’ll use this framework to examine the military applications of emerging technologies in Space, Cyber, AI & Machine Learning, and Autonomy. Students will develop their own proposals for new operational concepts, defense organizations, and strategies to address these emergent technologies while heeding the funding and political hurdles to get them implemented.

The course draws on the experience and expertise of guest lecturers from industry and from across the Department of Defense and other government agencies to provide context and perspective. Bookending the class will be two past secretaries of Defense – Ash Carter and Jim Mattis.

Much like we’ve done with our past classes; – the Lean LaunchPad which became the National Science Foundation I-Corps (taught in 98 universities) and Hacking For Defense (taught in 40 schools,) – our goal is to open source this class to other universities.

As Christian Brose assesses in his prescient book “The Kill Chain”, our challenge is not the lack of money, technology, or capable and committed people in the US government, military and private industry – but of a lack of imagination. This course, like its cousin Hacking for Defense, aims to harness America’s comparative advantage in innovative thinking and the quality of its institutions of higher education, to bring imaginative and creative approaches to developing the new operational concepts we need to compete and prevail in this era of great power rivalry.

The syllabus for the class is below:

Technology, Innovation and Modern War

Part I: History, Strategy and Challenges

Sep 15: Course Introduction
Guest Speaker: Ash Carter

Sep 17: History of Defense Innovation: From Long Bows to Nuclear Weapons and Off-Set Strategies.
Guest Speaker: Max Boot

Sep 22: DoD 101: An Introduction to the US Department of Defense: How Military Technology is Sourced, Acquired and Deployed.

Sep 24: US Defense Strategies and Military Plans in an Era of Great Power Competition

Sep 29: Technology, Ethics and War
Guest Panel

Oct 1: Congress and the power of the purse

Part II: Military Applications, Operational Concepts, Organization and Strategy

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Oct 6: Introduction

Oct 8: Military Applications
Guest Speaker: LTG (ret) Jack Shanahan, fmr Director Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC)

Autonomy
Oct 13: Introduction
Oct 15: Military Applications

Cyber
Oct 20: Introduction
Military Applications

Space
Oct 27: Introduction
Military Applications

Part III: Building an integrated plan for the future (Student group project)

How to build a plan for future war
Nov 3: Conops planning
Guest Speaker(s): COCOM and Joint Staff Planners

Nov 5: Budget and Innovation
Guest Speaker: OMB Defense lead

Nov 10: Team working sessions with DoD Mentors

Group Presentations and Critiques
Nov 12: Groups 1-2
Guest Critique: US Indo-Pacom TBA

Nov 17: Groups 2-4

Course Reflections
Nov 19: Defending a Shared Vision for the Future
Guest Speaker James Mattis

May 20, 2020

Seven Steps to Small Business Recovery

What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.
Friedrich Nietzsche

The world is a different place than it was 90 days ago. Countries traded saving lives by shutting down most of their economy. Tens of millions who had jobs are now unemployed worrying about their future. Business owners large and small are struggling to find their footing, wondering what will be the new normal when the recovery happens. For the majority of companies, the business models of the past will not return.

Hit hardest were most small business service providers. Each day as they sheltered in place watching their bank accounts dwindle, they wondered: If I can’t perform my services, what will happen to my business? The reactions ping-ponged between uncertainty, fear, panic, anger and distress. But over the last month the reaction from a growing percentage has been resolve. Resolve to leave behind elements or services in their business that no longer work in the current environment, and determination to create new ones that do.

A company that has its finger on the pulse of tens of thousands of small businesses is Honeybook. They provide the software for freelancers and small businesses to manage clients and their business – proposals, billing, contracts, payments, project tracking, etc.

Honeybook CEO Oz Alon has had a front-row seat to how their members have pivoted, providing their services in new and creative ways, and are sharing these in a special Rising Tide feature on their website. Here are a few examples:

Pivot from In-person to Online

Jill Johnson, owner of The Paint Mixer, used to offer painting parties and creative adventures in her Salt Lake City studio. She started offering paint-from-home kits and hosting private parties via Zoom for team building, social hours, and birthday parties. “Our clients are loving the experience and are very grateful. I receive emails and texts, as well as social media posts daily, and it is inspiring,” Jill says.
Regina, owner of Silly Sparkles, is a children’s entertainer offering magic/puppet shows, face painting and balloon twisting at events. Since she can’t perform in person anymore, she’s switched to virtual party packages with customized entertainment for each client. “People still have birthdays, and they still want to make them special!” Regina says. “Virtual parties are a great way to serve those clients, and they’re willing to pay for it.”
Jordan Edelson, co-founder of Chic Sketch, reimagined his events business as a virtual events business. His goal was to create a similar experience to their in-person events where guests are sketched live by their team of talented illustrators. Their team now does live sketching during virtual events over a video conferencing platform.
Melissa Rasmussen of Catering By Chef Melissa normally offers custom catering with a farm-to-table approach, but in this current business climate, she’s pivoted to offer dinner meal kits. The menu is posted on social media and on their website; customers pay their invoice online; and the meal kits are available to be picked up at their commercial kitchen or delivered for a small fee.
Florist Robin Smith of Rhapsody in Blooms started offering virtual floral design classes. She either ships class supplies (including the flowers and a vessel) directly to participants or arranges no-contact pickups. All students have exactly the same products to work with and join a Zoom call to attend the class.

The Seven-Step Small Business Pivot Process
Honeybook CEO Oz Alon observed that there was a pattern to these pivots. Regardless of the type of service they were offering or the kind of businesses they had, they took the same seven steps:

Create an MVP, Minimal Viable Product or MVS, Minimum Viable Service—Assess your current business model. What capabilities and current services do you have? Then think about what the market needs right now and how you can adjust your services to meet those needs. What is it that people will grab out of your hands? Create an MVP or MVS to start.

Alexander Osterwalder co-creator of the business model canvas, suggests a playbook of business model moves you can make:

Shelter in place as a market opportunity
What new value propositions (products/services) can you offer to those stuck at home or to those who need to operate with new social distancing rules?

Resource pivots
How can you use/repurpose your existing resources for new offerings?

Delivery/Distribution Channel innovation
Can you move to digital/online, extending your reach and potential customers?

Opportunity to buy/acquire
Are there resources (people/physical assets) that others are abandoning that you can now get?

Jill Johnson, The Paint Mixer owner, suggests taking a look at the assets you already have. “Our pivot happened pretty quickly,” she says. “I knew as soon as our surrounding counties started to mandate closure that the business would be in trouble if I didn’t try something. After a good cry (and a glass of whiskey), I met with my team to talk ideas and short-term solutions. I looked around the studio and decided to use what we had. We offer painting parties and creative adventures. With the stock in our studios I took photos of what could be a potential ‘create-at-home kit.’”

Regina, owner of Silly Sparkles, seconds working with what you have as a starting point for a Minimum Viable Service. She says before you invest money in new equipment, it’s important to be resourceful. “When you use what you have, you’ll quickly learn what works for you and what doesn’t,” she says. “For my first virtual show, I only had magic props, green fabric for a green screen and a laptop. I didn’t need to invest a lot of money in a green screen because what I had worked just fine. I did, however, need to invest in a better mic.”

2. Customer discovery— While you might have come up with a great Minimum Viable Service, it’s just a series of guesses and assumptions. The next step is to validate the problem/need with customer discovery, by asking your existing customer base if they would be interested in your new service. You can do a poll on social media or send out an email blast to get a sense, then use video conferencing to do deep dives on real interest and intent to buy. Jill says, “We did a soft rollout with our mailing list to see if there was any interest, and there was!”

3. Rapid testing—Don’t spin your wheels trying to perfect your new service. Get it in the hands of your customers as soon as you can to test product/market fit. “Don’t spend energy building it. Create one, take a photo and try it with your current list. Then, when demand is apparent, build like crazy,” Jill says.

If you want to get started testing your idea quickly, consider giving it away for free at first. “It’s easy to get overwhelmed,” Regina says. “Instead of complicating the process, just jump in and try something! Start by offering a free, live magic show to family and friends. You’ll learn so much from this test run and it will give you momentum.”

4. Refine your offering—Another key part of rapid pivoting is a fast feedback loop. Constantly ask for feedback and act on it—improve on what’s working and tweak what’s not. Jill says, “The first 6 weeks I hand-delivered every package in the neighboring areas. I would text to let [customers] know it was outside and that I would love feedback. This touch allowed direct contact with every consumer.”

While customer feedback is great, also consider getting feedback from your peers. “Once you’ve started simple and tried a test run, it’s time to learn about how to improve your process,” Regina says. “Send out a recording of your first rough performances to other performers who have already been doing virtual parties. You’ll most likely receive insightful feedback. With some minor tweaks, you can upgrade your show significantly.”

5. Market on all your channels—Share about your new offering everywhere your audience is, whether that’s your website, email list, or on social media. Jordan Edelson of Chic Sketch shares about his new business offering on Instagram, driving customers to a specific landing page to learn more. The landing page also includes a YouTube video of an actual live event to help potential clients see how the service works.

Don’t forget to keep both your offering and your messaging simple. “Make it fun, make it accessible and make it easy for your clients to buy,” Jill advises.

6. Rely on tried-and-true tools—While some parts of your business may need to be altered, others may still work just fine, including tools, processes and frameworks that help you run and scale your business. Continue to rely on these to make pivoting business easier.

7. Share with the community—If your new service works, be sure to share this knowledge with your community, whether that’s on Facebook groups or in virtual meet-ups. In case anyone else has tried something similar, you can get feedback to refine your service. If it didn’t work, sharing with your community is still valuable as you may swap stories that may inspire you to go a different direction entirely.

What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger
Shelter in place is a mass extinction event for many industries. Not every business will survive. But what will emerge are businesses that diversified their offerings better positioned to withstand future volatility by providing complementary channels and offerings. And they’re opening up new ways service providers can scale to more customers.

“I think our Paint Mixer business is changed forever,” Jill Johnson says. “For the first time we now have a service that allows us to reach a national audience way beyond our local area. It will also allow us to create more classes that people can join virtually. I don’t think this is a short-term solution at all, but an entirely new direction that we have to take.”

Jordan Edelson of Chic Sketch observes, “There has been a paradigm shift in consumer behaviors, especially in their adoption and emotional acceptance of virtual video conferencing. The world changed overnight, and it has opened a door for our new service.”

Lessons Learned

The Seven-Step Small Business Pivot Process

Create an MVP or MVS, Minimum Viable Service

Do Customer Discovery

Rapidly test your idea

Refine your offering

Market on all your channels

Rely on tried-and-true tools

Share with the community

Carpe Diem – seize the day

We’re going to be holding a series of 5-day Hacking for the Recovery classes for businesses searching for the new normal at Stanford this summer. If you’re affiliated with Stanford, find out more or sign up at https://h4r.stanford.edu

November 12, 2019

Why The Government is Isn’t a Bigger Version of a Startup

This article previously appeared in War On The Rocks

There was a time when much of U.S. academia was engaged in weapon systems research for the Defense Department and intelligence community. Some of the best and brightest wanted to work for defense contractors or corporate research and development labs. And the best startups spun out of Stanford were building components for weapon systems.

Indeed, Silicon Valley was born as a center for weapon systems development and its software and silicon helped end the Cold War.

During World War II the United States did something its adversaries did not; it enlisted professors and graduate students as civilians in 105 colleges and universities to build advanced weapon systems — nuclear weapons, radar, etc. After World War II, the military-academic relationship that was so effective against Germany and Japan mobilized to face the Soviet threat and almost every research university (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, Caltech, Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin, Cornell, University of Chicago, and many others) continued to engage in weapon systems research during the Cold War.

Unique among them was Stanford, which provost Fred Terman (the father of American electronic warfare and electronic intelligence in World War I)) built as a center of excellence in microwaves and electronics. Rather than focus the university inward on research, Terman took the radical step of encouraging Stanford professors and graduate students to start companies applying engineering to pressing military problems. The companies they started in the 1950s and 60s were based on Stanford’s defense contacts and contracts — microwave components, electronic warfare, and intelligence systems, and then the first wave of semiconductor companies. As there was no venture capital, these early startups were funded by early sales to weapon systems prime contractors and subcontractors.

But this quarter-century relationship between the military and universities ended with a bang in 1969. In the middle of the Vietnam War, student riots protesting military research forced the end of classified work on most college campuses. One of the unintended consequences was that many of the academics went off to found a wave of startups selling their technology to the military. For example, at Stanford after student riots in April 1969 shut down the Applied Electronics Laboratory, James de Broekert ,who was building electronic intelligence satellites, left the university and co-founded three Silicon Valley military intelligence companies: Argo Systems, Signal Science, and Advent Systems.

Within a decade, the rise of venture capital in Silicon Valley enabled startups to find commercial customers rather than military ones. And from then on, innovation in semiconductors, supercomputers, and software would be driven by startups, not the government.

After 9/11, with the memories of the fall of the twin towers, this ecosystem of military, academic, corporate, and startup actors coalesced for the decade as U.S. companies felt a patriotic duty to help their country defeat a common enemy.

But the 2013 Snowden revelations damaged that tenuous relationship yet again. In hindsight the damage wasn’t the result of what the United States was doing, but over the Pentagon’s inability and unwillingness to own up to why it was doing it: After the intelligence failure of 9/11, security agencies overcompensated by widespread, warrantless datamining as well as electronic and telephonic surveillance, including on U.S. persons.

Without a clear explanation of why this had been done, startups, which were already being funded by ever-increasing pools of venture capital, abandoned cooperation with the Defense Department and focused on high returns on social media and commercial applications. The commercial applications of big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, drones, robotics, cyber, quantum computing, and biotechnology are the core foundations on which the Pentagon needs to build the weapons of the 21st century. Yet the development of these advanced technologies is now being driven by commercial interests, not the Defense Department.

America’s adversaries understand this. China is tightly integrating its defense establishment with startups, companies, and academia in “military-civilian fusion.” Russia, Iran, and North Korea have also fused those activities.

Reconstituting the tightly connected military-academic-commercial ecosystem that the Defense Department once had requires the Pentagon to relearn skills it once had, overcoming decades of avoiding the political and social issues of what it takes to rally the nation against a common threat. Today, every government agency, service branch, and combatant command is adopting innovation activities (hackathons, design thinking classes, innovation workshops, et al.) to tap into the creativity of a new generation of soldier — born into a digital world, comfortable with technology, and willing to improve and enhance America’s ability to fight and win.

The Government Can’t Act Like a Startup
However, those activities are not enough. The government isn’t a bigger version of a startup and can’t act like a startup does. Innovation activities in government agencies most often result in innovation theater. While these activities shape and build culture, they don’t win wars, and rarely deliver shippable or deployable products.

Startups dream in years, plan in months, evaluate in weeks, and ship in days. At times this means startups operate at speeds so fast they appear to be a blur to government agencies. It’s not that these companies are smarter than Defense Department employees, but they operate with different philosophies, different product development methodologies, and with different constraints.

The table below summarizes a few of the salient differences. Some of the most important are the least obvious. Startups can do anything. They can break the law and apologize later (as Uber, Airbnb, and Tesla did), but a government official taking the same type of risks can go to jail.

Urgency and risk-taking in a startup are integral parts of the culture, felt by 100 percent of early-stage employees. The urgency servicemembers feel on the battlefield is felt by few in government agencies, and most often there are negative incentives for risk-taking. In a startup cluster (Silicon Valley, Beijing, Tel Aviv) a failed entrepreneur is known as “experienced.” In a government agency, they’re likely known as being out of a job.

Innovation at speed is a given at a startup but the exception in a government agency. Advances in commercial technologies are occurring at no less than two, and up to ten, times the speed of comparable Pentagon-developed or acquired systems. Some of the speed is simply due to development methodologies. Waterfall development is still used by most defense contractors, resulting in updates of systems measured in years. With Agile development, used by all startups, updates can occur in weeks or sometimes days, or even hours. Some of the speed differences are because commercial companies and academics face Darwinian competitive pressures for revenue or recognition. These force rapid technical advances in fields such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, robotics, big data, and analytics.

The very definition of a contractor implies a contract. And a government contract starts with fixed requirements that only change with contract modifications. That makes sense when the problem and solution are known. But when they are unknown the traditional methods of contracting fail. Startups recognize that when new circumstances arise, they can pivot — make substantive changes to their products without any new contracts.Existing contractors have learned how to master the arcane defense acquisition system and live with the slow decision-making and payment processes. In some agencies, large contractors seem to “own” sections, offices, organizations, or programs. Often former government employees, at the level of GS-15 and below, will leave as staffers and return the next day working for large Beltway contractors, working or managing the same programs they previously worked. This relationship between government agency and contractor further impedes and often rejects innovation or disruption. Officers know they will likely lose their post-retirement future if they seek radical change.

This symbiotic relationship between government agencies and incumbent contractors is also a barrier to new entrants, in particular to startups with the very technologies the Department of Defense now needs. While the Pentagon has made efforts to reform the process (Other Transaction Authorities, TechFAR, mid-tier contracting, accelerators…) there is still a fundamental misunderstanding of what financial incentives would attract the best and brightest investors to guide their companies to work with the Defense Department. There are no incentives for prime contractors to invest in new ventures and none to acquire new ventures. And there is no plan for how to rapidly insert and deploy startup technologies into weapon systems.

So, the question is: What’s next? How do leaders in government think about and organize innovation in a way that makes a difference?

The answer is that, yes, government agencies need to be more agile. And yes, they need to fix the systemic internal issues that hinder their own innovators’ contributions. But, in addition, what they are missing is a comprehensive plan to build a 21st-century defense innovation ecosystem — reintegrating the military, academia, and private enterprise. To harness both their own internal innovators and this new external ecosystem the Defense Department needs what I call an innovation doctrine to organize their efforts to rapidly access and mobilize talent and technology. The Pentagon can build a mindset, culture, and process to fix this. This doctrine would let the country again capture the untapped power and passion of the best and brightest to leapfrog adversaries and win wars.

May 29, 2019

The Evolution of Entrepreneurial Education and Corporate Innovation

I was interviewed by Philip Bouchard, Executive Director of TrustedPeer Entrepreneurship Advisory, about how entrepreneurship education has changed, mission-driven entrepreneurship, and what we’ve learned about corporate innovation.

Worth a read.

Interview highlights:

How is the way that universities teach entrepreneurship evolving?
Lean LaunchPad class developed for Stanford
Innovation and entrepreneurship will become the liberal arts of the 21st century
Teaching basic entrepreneurial appreciation
Mission-Driven Entrepreneurship
Hacking for X classes
Ethics in entrepreneurship
How has innovation in large corporations evolved over the last 10 years?
Innovation theater in large corporations
“I want to see what you look like in a prison suit.”
What are companies doing beyond innovation theater?
How innovation can succeed inside of a large company
The easy part is, “Let’s have an incubator.” The hard part is, “How do we deliver something?”
“Heroic innovation” within large corporations
End-to-end “Innovation Pipeline” process
Innovators are not entrepreneurs
Building an entrepreneurship ecosystem
How can corporations work more closely with universities?

Philip Bouchard: You’ve started teaching at Berkeley since 2002, Columbia in 2003 and at Stanford since 2011. How is the way that universities teach entrepreneurship evolving? What changes have you seen in the last 15 years?

Steve Blank: When I first starting teaching, the capstone entrepreneurship class was how to write a business plan. Other classes were on how to prep for VC pitches or develop the five year income statements, balance sheets and cash flows or read case studies. Today, people laugh if somebody says that’s a capstone entrepreneurship class. But years ago, we had no alternative – how to write a business plan was it.

My contribution has been, “Why don’t we design classes more closely modeled to what innovators and entrepreneurs actually do.” Today the capstone class is most often experiential, team-based, hands on, focused around the search for a repeatable and scalable business model. And the Lean LaunchPad class I developed at Stanford was the first such class. It was adopted by the National Science Foundation for commercializing science in the United States. It’s called NSF I-Corps.

The other change is that universities, instead of being passive, have become active in building an entrepreneurial community. In addition to Stanford I also teach at Columbia, and at these research universities – Stanford, Columbia, Berkeley, and others – they all now have an internal incubator, they have maker spaces, they have their own venture funds, they connect to the community, they connect to venture capital. They’ve become outward-facing universities. It’s a big idea.

Years ago, entrepreneurship was taught like everything else, inward-facing, which was a mindset of, “I focus on what I know as an academic and I will teach you that,” which was mostly theory and/or consulting experience with large corporations. And the odds of learning from faculty who actually had experienced the chaos and uncertainty of building a startup was low. It wasn’t really part of the job as an educator. Today, if you’re building an entrepreneurship program, the teaching team most often includes adjuncts with entrepreneurial experience as complements to the tenured faculty, classes are experiential and the community you’re building is a set of additional components that never existed before.

PB: In addition to being more outward facing, how should universities be thinking about what to offer next? What do you see in the next 2-3 years?

SB: I think innovation and entrepreneurship will become the liberal arts of the 21st century. With the nature of work changing, the core skills entrepreneurs need to know to become practitioners are actually core skills that everybody will need to know to get a job: creativity, agility, resilience, tenacity, curiosity.

The analogy I like to use is that 500 years ago in the Renassiance we realized that the best way to teach artists, painters and sculptors, was by via hands-on apprenticeships and long-term commitment. You learned a modicum of theory and got a ton practice. (Today, if you’ve decided the arts are your career, your goal might be to get into Juilliard or CalArts.)

But about 100 years ago, in the art world, somebody had a lightbulb moment and said, “Wait a minute, in addition to the capstone classes, why don’t we teach art appreciation at the earliest possible age to everyone?” For example, finger-painting, making clay ashtrays and writing. The reason for that is two-fold. One is to have people self-identify at an early age that, “Oh, my gosh. Painting can be a career? I knew I was interested.” And second, so that the rest of us who are not going to be artists can appreciate how hard it is, and learn how to look at art and how to look at sculpture and how to appreciate good writing.

I believe the analogy is identical for entrepreneurship.The capstone entrepreneurship classes like NSF I-Corps or a Lean LaunchPad class, are for those who have already decided they want to be entrepreneurs. The part of the entrepreneurship curriculum that’s missing is offering entrepreneurial appreciation classes to everyone. We ought to be creating a set of classes on creativity, agility and resilience and being able to tell facts from “fake news” — components of innovation and entrepreneurship that I think are going to be required 21st century skills.

PB: The trend is to add majors, minors and certificates in entrepreneurship. Not just in the business schools. For example, you can minor in entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado College of Music. In terms of teaching basic entrepreneurial appreciation, how saturated should entrepreneurship become? Is it one or two courses? Where do you see this trend going?

SB: Teaching basic entrepreneurial appreciation in the 21st century is literally the equivalent to liberal arts of the 20th. Forward thinking schools will start offering a series of classes that are core curriculum like liberal arts were in schools in the ’50s through the ’80s that said “for a liberal arts education you need to understand literature and you need to understand art.” In the 21st century we’re going to add some additional core skills.

That said, entrepreneurship education needs to be a combination of theory and practice. It’s pretty easy to offer classroom entrepreneurship lectures and forget that it’s the hands-on application that makes the theory relevant. Think if medical schools just taught doctors the textbooks, but never had them touch a patient.

The other direction where teaching is going – and what we’ve been pioneering – is Mission-Driven Entrepreneurship. Instead of students or faculty coming in with their own ideas — we now have them working on societal problems, whether they’re problems for the State Department or the military or non-profits/NGOs, or for the City of Oakland or for energy or the environment, or for anything they’re passionate about. And the trick is we use the same Lean LaunchPad / I-Corps curriculum — and kept the same class structure – experiential, hands-on, driven this time by a mission-model not a business model.

Mission-driven entrepreneurship is the answer to students who say, “I want to give back. I want to make my community, country or world a better place, while solving some of the toughest problems.” These classes include Hacking for Defense, Hacking for Diplomacy, Hacking for Energy, Hacking for Impact, or Hacking for Oceans, etc., but the umbrella term is “mission-driven entrepreneurship.” The class syllabus uses exactly the same pedagogy as the Lean LaunchPad and I-Corps classes.

PB: How has your Lean LaunchPad course, ENGR 245, evolved?

SB: I’ve always believed that great classes continue to thrive after the original teachers have moved on. To be honest, as I watch other instructors now run these classes, I feel a proud “passing of the torch” though touched by moments of King Lear and Kurosawa’s Ran. Way past my ad hoc activities, the Stanford teaching team has thoroughly professionalized the class.

After eight years the class is still taught to students working on their own problems. It’s taught at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia and probably another hundred universities and colleges because I open-sourced the class and trained educators on how to teach it. 98 universities teach it through the National Science Foundation.

As I mentioned, the Mission-Driven Entrepreneurship classes are a new variant that’s taught in ~30 universities. The nice part is that we have educators who are already trained on teaching Lean LaunchPad or I-Corps, so for the educators there’s nothing particularly new. The only hard part about it, is to get well-defined problems from sponsors in the local city or government agency that you offer to students.

PB: Everyone looks for a turnkey solution. “I want a low overhead, self-guided solution.” Can someone go through your Lean LaunchPad step-by-step course without a trainer? Can it be self-directed? How long does it take to train a trainer?

SB: All my class lectures are online at Udacity.com for free. Can you become a founder by watching videos? Perhaps, but founders are closer to artists than any other profession. So can you become an artist by reading about art? Can you learn entrepreneurship without taking an experiential hands-on class or better, actually be part of a startup? Well, you can read a lot about entrepreneurship and learn the theory, but it’s like reading about painting or sculpture or music. You need theory and practice – lots of practice.

PB: Is ethics in entrepreneurship going to be part of the broader entrepreneurship curriculum like a general liberal arts education? Is ethics something that you bring into your Lean LaunchPad course or your ENGR 245 course?

SB: I think ethics are a critical missing component of most business curriculums. At Stanford, Tom Byers, who runs the innovation and entrepreneurship program inside the engineering school, has made that a big deal and it’s now part of the curriculum. Tom has added a class on entrepreneurial ethics.

However, the problem with teaching entrepreneurial ethics is the same as with teaching corporate ethics: Everything is great in theory until the sxxt hits the fan. When you don’t have any checks and balances, that is, when the government isn’t really paying attention or there are no consequences, you tend to get people who game the system, whether they’re corporations or they’re entrepreneurs and innovators.

It’s exactly like if you’ve ever been driving on a highway and reach a merge and people are cutting into the line and you go, “What the heck am I’m doing waiting for the merge while people are cutting in?” Then everybody else starts doing it and you think “Why am I the only person who’s patiently waiting?” There’s a social component about what’s the norm for behavior.

It’s not like we need a nanny-state, but if there’s no enforcement at all, we can teach ethics all we want, but people tend to devolve to the least common denominator.

PB: How has innovation in large corporations evolved over the last 10 years? You talk about “innovation theater” in large corporations. What’s the trend in terms of corporations developing cultures of innovation and programs for intrapreneurs?

SB: If you’re a large corporation, the world has turned upside down. In hindsight the 20th century was the golden age for corporations. Today, companies face five challenges they never had to deal with:

Challenge one – As companies are discovering every day, the web has changed everything. Distribution channels, brand loyalty, etc.

Challenge two – Large companies are dealing with startups that are funded with unimaginable capital. In the past, the idea of a startup having more capital than an existing corporation was a fantasy. But today if I’m a startup and I’m raising a hundred million dollars or billions of dollars, like Uber, Airbnb or Tesla, I can take on an entire industry.

Challenge three – Today, investors willingly fund startups to do anything on day one. Anything. Including break the law. Tesla, Airbnb, Uber, all were predicated on, “Well, what if we said, ‘screw the law’. How big would that opportunity be?”

In the 20th century no venture capitalist would have funded that. In the 21st century they got out their little eyeshades and calculators and said, “Ha! If we actually succeed, there’s a $10 billion company here.”

In contrast, as much as a corporation wants to do that, the first thing that will happen is your general counsel’s in your office saying, “I want to see what you look like in a prison suit.” Because a company can’t do the things that a startup can.

Challenge four – In a startup, 100% of the company is focused on innovation and entrepreneurship. In a large corporation, 99% of the company is focused on executionof the current business model by building repeatable processes and procedures. And a very small percentage are focused on innovation. I could keep going on down the list.

Challenge five – In a startup, if you win, it’s a payout of billions of dollars. In a large company, for the individual, there is no such payout.

PB: However, there are some companies that do evolve, that do pivot and make the right changes. What you’re talking about, “A large corporation is not a startup,” doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to go the way of the dodo. What are companies doing beyond innovation theater?

SB: I just wanted to give you the setup of why it’s harder for corporations. Not why they can’t do it. In spite of all the things that I just mentioned, there are large companies that have figured out how to build innovation ecosystems. My favorite is a private company called W.L.Gore. At their core they make products out of expanded PTFE like Gore-Tex. But they’ve taken that basic technology past fabrics into multiple markets – medical, filtration, fibers, cables, etc. They have a process of continual innovation – an innovation pipeline. But this type of innovation requires leadership who understands that is their goal. If you’re a large company’s CEO today, the problem is that you’re dealing with, well, lots of issues, not just innovation.

One – “How do I deal with activist investors who want to take my company apart and sell it for pieces?”
Two – “I’ve been hearing about this innovation stuff, but if I’m running a 10,000-person company, my skill-set is about execution, not innovation. I might give you some head nods about innovation, but I really don’t have that in my DNA.”
Three – Companies are driven by processes and procedure, those same processes and procedures strangle innovation in its crib. For innovation to succeed inside of a large company, you need a parallel set of processes, not to replace the existing ones, but to operate on a fast track.

Some companies have figured out how to do this, not just internally, but by just acquiring those that do. So, if you think about how a large company can innovate, they could build, they could buy, they could partner, they could license. All parts of their toolset where startups don’t have those opportunities. Basically, startups are just building.

PB: Large corporations have a number of tools they use for innovation. One area is innovation challenges and idea challenges to come up with a thousand new ideas. A second option is for corporations to provide accelerators where they invite startups to apply to be part of their accelerator program. A third is incubators and makers’ spaces. Do you see those as innovation programs that can work? They’re spending a lot of money on it.

SB: No. What you just described is innovation theater. These are innovation activities, not deliverables. The hard part in a company is not getting a demo or setting up an internal accelerator, it’s getting something delivered all the way through your existing sales channel. What does it take to get from that demo into your engineering group, to be delivered as a product into your existing sales channel? And that’s where the difficulties are. You run into, “Well, wait a minute, this isn’t on our budget or schedule.” “Wait a minute, this conflicts with our existing product line.” “This will put our most profitable product out of business,” or “We don’t even have a sales force that knows how to sell this thing.”

A good number of companies focus on the easy part, which is, “Let’s have an incubator/accelerator.” The hard part is, “How do we deliver something with speed and urgency?” For example, when I teach this for the government, our focus is on innovation that gets deployed and fielded, not demos. (Yes, you might need a demo to convince someone to fund your program, but the demo is not the goal – delivery is.) Companies have more demos than they’ll ever need. But really the goal of a successful innovation program is figuring out how do you deploy something by getting through the hard political wiring diagram of who owns what, and how does this differ from what we already have, and which budget is it going to come from, and “this is unscheduled” and “wait a minute, it doesn’t meet our quality standards” and “we’re going to screw up our brand”?

How do we solve those problems? And that doesn’t mean it’s not solvable. It just means the “Let’s throw a party” approach reminds me of the old Andy Hardy movies of “Let’s put on a show.” Ok, we’ve got a show, now what?

The “now what” is that we lack a corporate innovation doctrine.

PB: I’m going to read a quote from you, which is “We believe the next big step is to get teams of leaders to think about the innovation process from end to end. That is, to visualize the entire flow of how and from where an idea is generated – the source – all the way to deployment – how to get it into the user’s hands.” You also have talked about an innovation stack and operational innovation, which is absent and so difficult to implement. What prompted these insights?

SB: Here’s what I observed. Large companies and government agencies have always had innovation, but it’s what I call “heroic innovation.” That is, there was no process, no procedure, but you always hear stories about somebody who managed to get a new product or idea out the door. We tend to celebrate those without anybody ever thinking, “Well, wait a minute. Maybe the fact that there are no formal innovation processes is the problem, not that there was some heroic stuff happening.”

In the last couple years, my work, Eric Ries’s work, Alexander Osterwalder’s work, all were focused on building a body of professional knowledge – doctrine – around innovation. And as part of that we’ve developed a set of tools that could be used to search for business models. Companies have adopted this innovation doctrine and startup tools and have been running accelerators and whatever. The problem is that there still wasn’t an end-to-end innovation implementation process, inside a large company.

What we came up with last year is called the Innovation Pipeline, a process inside a company or a government agency that says, “Let’s start with innovation sourcing. And then build a process to take that all the way to delivery or deployment. What are the steps internally we need to take that are different than how engineering builds products today?”

This end-to-end pipeline has a couple of steps. The first step is where the ideas or technology come from. They can come from inside the company, outside as acquisitions, universities, etc. The second step is, “What problem are we solving?” which we call problem curation. “Is this a real problem or is this a neat piece of flashy technology? How do we prioritize all the things we’re now doing inside this pipeline. And then how do we test solutions and hypotheses?”

In the middle of this pipeline is the I-Corps Lean LaunchPad methodology for customer discovery and validation. Next, how do we incubate it, and then how do we transition and integrate it with our existing engineering and sales organizations to deliver this stuff That’s an end-to-end process.

By contrast, an incubator and accelerator is a point activity.

As we’ve been teaching organizations this end-to-end Innovation Pipeline process we realized that at each one of those steps the team evolves. At the beginning of that pipeline you might have an innovator, a technologist in R&D. That’s great, but we now know that either in startups or large companies innovators don’t make sxxt happen. They invent things.

Typically, to partner with the innovator on the first step, you need to find an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur inside of a company is somebody who knows how to get stuff across the finish line inside the bureaucracy. That’s very different than the innovator. The mistake that we tend to make is, “Oh, let’s teach the innovators how to do that.” But innovators are almost never entrepreneurs. You can make them appreciate entrepreneurs, but they’re not the same people.

PB: A trending challenge for directors of university entrepreneurship programs is to build an entrepreneurship ecosystem. These executive directors are struggling to decide, “What do I build out next? What program do I add next?” Is there some way to take your approach and to direct it to building university entrepreneurship ecosystems?

SB: An example of what you just talked about is the tech transfer and venture group at Columbia University, run by Orin Herskowitz. Orin has spun seven different programs out of the Lean LaunchPad and Hacking for Defense programs. In energy and biotech and devices and whatever. Basically, using this pedagogy and building an entire ecosystem around it. It’s really impressive. Columbia’s tech transfer organization is a model of how universities may want to think about entrepreneurship ecosystems.

The other leading thinkers you should talk are Tom Byers and Tina Seelig at Stanford. Stanford and Tom and Tina and their STVP program are still ground zero for entrepreneurship programs in the world.

Also to watch is Stephen Spinelli who just took over as Babson’s president. Between Spinelli, Orin, and Tom and Tina I think you’ll get an idea of the bleeding edge university entrepreneurship programs. If you want to talk to people who are inventing the future rather than talking about it, I would start with these three universities.

PB: How can corporations work more closely with universities? How can they tap into student entrepreneurship talent for developing the kind of disruptive initiatives that corporations want? Instead of waiting until something happens. How can you create a pipeline with universities that are local or even virtually with universities?

SB: For decades companies have been the primary acquirer of university research via tech transfer. And companies were the magnet for universities best and brightest students. No longer. In the 21st century companies are no longer competing for this tech and talent with their corporate peers, but with startups. To tap into university talent corporate innovation programs need to be more than an afterthought. Corporate leadership needs to make their internal commitment to innovation a beacon to the talent they desire.

November 27, 2018