The Lean Innovation Educators Summit: December 2020 White Paper

The Lean Innovation Educators Summit:
December 2020 White Paper

Build Back Better: Entrepreneurship Education and The Lean LaunchPad Methodology in a Post-COVID-19 Economy

Dear Lean Innovation Educators,

It was in the summer of 2019 when Steve Blank and I agreed to create the Lean Innovation Educators Summit. We had simple goals. We knew that the Lean Innovation movement created a revolution in how entrepreneurship education took place. Having been at the forefront of this revolution, we knew there were few guidelines and limited resources for those creating and leading these programs. And we knew that the best resource was the community of educators—each facing their own challenges, running their own experiments, and adapting and evolving their educational approaches. The challenge was how to capture and share these learnings. The opportunity was to build a resilient community of educators with the proverbial positive feedback loop. Thus, the first Lean Innovation Educators Summit was born.

This was, of course, an experiment. The hypotheses were: (1) invite the right people, and they will come, (2) they will happily share their challenges and best practices, and (3) these individuals would, over time, attract others to the conversation, and we would build a robust mutually supportive community of entrepreneurship educators. In those glorious pre-COVID days, our first Summit was held in December 2019, in Scotts Valley, CA, in the redwood-studded hills overlooking Silicon Valley. Over 100 entrepreneurship educators came from near and far. We had attendees from not only all over North America but also Europe and Asia. The sessions taught us a lot. Perhaps most importantly was to confirm the supreme value of “Lessons Learned” from each other. So hypotheses 1 and 2 were validated. Check. But what about #3?

Then in March 2020, the onslaught of the global pandemic created a new, perhaps existential, challenge. Would our Lean Innovation educational processes and frameworks be agile, responsive, and effective? What do experiential education and customer discovery mean in the age of social distancing? Originally we had thought of perhaps reconvening the Summit annually, but we immediately started planning a mid-year online session in response to the urgency of the situation. In July 2020, over 400 of us gathered. We learned two very important things: First, this community of educators was indeed growing and sharing. It was truly viral. Our original hypothesis #3 appears to be validated. Second, and most importantly, we learned that our Lean Innovation educational approaches adapted well to the new environment. The group validated the great value in the flipped classroom, asynchronous on-line lectures, and on-line methods developed and deployed at scale prior to COVID, e.g., through I-Corps and the canonical Lean LaunchPad curriculums.

The next step was clear. Having validated our three key hypotheses, it was time to scale. The Lean Innovation Educators Summit was a valuable resource worth investing in. The pace of challenges facing our students and their entrepreneurial teams was not slowing down. Technology evolution, COVID pandemic dislocations, societal pressures for inclusion and diversity, and the need to help our economy recover all called for our active engagement.

Just doing more of the same would not be enough. These are the challenges that confront our institutions, our students, and ourselves. And these are the challenges we brought to our third summit this past December. This white paper presents our lessons learned, and as importantly, points to contributions we can make going forward.

I wish to thank my co-hosts, our program sponsors, and most importantly, our Summit participants in joining me in this challenge.

Steve Blank speaks during a Hacking for Defense class at Stanford University. Read Steve Blank's summary of learnings from the 2020 summit.

Jerome S. Engel
UC Berkeley
Lean Innovation Educators Summit Chairman

Download the White Paper

Here’s what’s included:

• The Future of Entrepreneurship and Education

  • A University President’s Perspective

  • The New Venture Investors’ Perspective

• The Lean Innovation Educators’ Perspective : Lessons Learned

  • Benefits

  • Challenges

  • Solutions

• What Now? Preparing for the Post-COVID-19 Economy

More Insights from Steve Blank

Learn more about how the pandemic has shifted the way we teach, what we learned teaching, and how we can use the Lean methodology to make an impact on our communities.

Read Steve Blank’s full summary of learnings from the 2020 Summit.