Five Days to Change the World – The Columbia Lean LaunchPad Class

We’ve taught our Lean LaunchPad entrepreneurship class at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia and the National Science Foundation in 8 week, 10 week and 12 week versions.  We decided to find out what was the Minimum Viable Product for our Lean LaunchPad class.

Could students get value out of a 5-day version of the class?

The Setup

At the invitation of Murray Low at the Entrepreneurship Center in the Columbia Business School, we went to New York to find out.  We were going to teach the Lean LaunchPad class in 5-days.   I was joined by my Startup Owners Manual co-author Bob Dorf, Alexander Osterwalder (author of Business Model Generation) and Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures.

As we’ve done in previous classes, the students form teams and come up with an idea before the class.

Potential students watched an on-line video of Osterwalder explaining the Business Model Canvas and then applied for admission to the class with a fully completed business model canvas. Here are two examples:

If you can’t see the presentation above, click here.

If you can’t see the presentation above, click here.

The Class

We had 69 students in 13 teams. Instead of going around the room introducing themselves, each group hit the ground running by presenting their canvas.

The class organization was pretty simple:

textbooks were The Startup Owners Manual and Business Model Generation
team presentations 9-12:30 (with continual instructor critiques)
working lunch 12:30-1:30 (with office hours)
lecture 1:30-3:00
get out of the building 3:00-on
repeat for 5-days

Resources

The 5-day syllabus is here.

All 13 teams Day 1 presentations are here.

Day 2 presentations here.

Day 3 presentations here.

Day 4 presentations here.

Day 5 presentations here.

The Outcome

After 5 days the teams collectively had ~1,200 face-to-face customer interviews, with another 1,000+ potential customers surveyed on-line.

Take a look at the same two teams presentations (compare it to their slides above):

If you can’t see the presentation above, click here.

If you can’t see the presentation above, click here.

Lessons Learned:

A five day Lean Launchpad Class is definitely worth doing.
The Business Model Canvas + Customer Development works even in this short amount of time

However we were in NYC where customer density was high.


As we’ve already found, this class needs to be taught as a joint engineering/mba class
Next time we teach we will complete the transition to a flipped classroom:

Have no lectures during class. We’ll offer video lectures, and use the time for class labs built around detailed analysis of 2 or 3 canvas pivots
Make teams use Salesforce, or some similar package, to track all contacts/customer calls

Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan, Customer Development, Lean LaunchPad, Teaching