The Paedagogus

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The Lean Startup Circle builds lean startup leadership and thinking, was founded in 2009 by Rich Collins, and today is an organization of thousands of startup founders, practitioners, and consultants who validate product and marketing assumptions through experimentation and observation is throwing its might behind USASBE Launch! a global student entrepreneurship competition.

As the Bay Area is the genesis of Lean thinking there is no shortage of thought leaders here and the San Francisco and Silicon Valley Lean Startup Circle Meetups set a high standard for the rest of 805 Meetups around the world.  (Vanity Metric).

In Berkeley, everyone say “Oakland”, the very city from which Steve Blank honed the platform of Lean thinking, customer development, and learn by DUing, their has been a void in Lean Startup Circle Meetups for no lack of entrepreneurial spirit, well educated Lean students, or businesses that want to be more Lean.  A Pivot was in order.

Recognizing this, Tristan Kromer, took ownership of the Berkeley Lean Startup Practicum, and is trying another experiment; he askied me to take over the group,  which will be housed in the historic Oakland Tribune Building.

Sigma Eta Pi, a Berkeley Entrepreneurship Fraternity President, Andy Yang, and Elect Kirtan Upadhyaya, and their 37 active brothers and sisters are on board to help restart this meetup in manner commensurate the groups proximity.   I could not be more honored to be working with them and the Lean Startup Circle.

Our mission: To build lean startup leadership and thinking among students, startup founders, practitioners, and consultants through build measure learn, Lean, best practices here in the East Bay.

Stay informed on our May Meetup and Join the group!  Come hear Uncle John’s Band.

Rancho Santiago

“Knock the ‘T’ out of Can’t”, my mothers favorite bedtime story, rang in my head at the NACCE Summit, as I listened to the Superintendant-President of the Long Beach Community  College District, Eloy Ortiz Oakley,  candidly speak of the challenges on the ground in community college education.

Mr. Oakley, a champion for equity in higher education outcomes,  spoke of community college district Presidents as entrepreneurs themselves, that must engage their community systematically and look for every opportunity to leverage this into their own ever more budget constrained programs.

Eloy shared the fundamental need to teach the basic language and cultural skills such that students can begin to access their higher level talents.  Talents he intends for them to put to work as a part of the Entrepreneur Seed Funding Pilot Program.

Few university chancellors or presidents have such a breadth of curricula or the responsibility for their community as a function of their own program succes drawing on their time.

At the State wide level, public and private organizations like the B&EC, and Community College League of  California collaborate to manage programs and also to organize Pathways connecting at risk high school districts, community colleges, and ultimately to the four year California State University system.

Timothy Stearns of Fresno State has pioneered Pathways, and has developed an exemplary network in collaboration with Marianne Dunklin, of Fresno City College,  that reaches all the way down into at risk high schools in the State Center Community College District.

Nationally, NACCE, the Summit Sponsor, The Kauffman Foundation, and the Association of Community College Trustees have the money and might to get behind promising programs that are turning the model on its head experientially.  Lorain Community College in Elyria Ohio is one of these whose program is being piloted elsewhere, like Long Beach City College under direction of Sheneui Weber.

While, this level of collaboration and triage may exist in other pedagogical disciplines, only entrepreneurship and innovation have such direct economic impact; they are enabling your Chance in a Million take it!

Provolone “wit”, Live Aid, the Meridian fire, soft pretzels, boat house row, struggling sports teams, Move, and the Babino!  There is a rich history and many traditions, both good and bad, but this place does not sit still, and its making itself over, yet again.

The skyline downtown has grown, cranes have returned and University City is exploding with the new buildings around historic landmarks, and new programs in pedagogy for student entrepreneurs of all disciplines.  Philadelphia is rapidly becoming an entrepreneurship startup force just a bit east of silicon valley with every bit the passion and skills to to give the west coast a run for the roses.

Just this week Drexel University elevated one of the nations top entrepreneurship programs to a University Wide Institute, and early this year announced that it will establish the Charles D. Close School of Entrepreneurship.    Mark Loschiavo‘s interdisciplinary program may now be threaded through engineering, design, medical research, law, and of course the Lebow Business School curricula.

At Penn, Professors Tom Cassel and Jeffrey Babin’s Engineering and Entrepreneurship program is the amalgamation of contemporary entrepreneurship education methods with the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences curriculum, driving student innovation.

Meanwhile at the Fox school of business the Owls have been busy recruiting top teaching talent like Dr. Andrew Maxwell to recreate experiential entrepreneurship at Temple.

These three together with the coordinated networks of other Pennsylvania schools, mentors, investors, advisors, state public policy and economic development centers, The Ben Franklin Partners, is affecting positive economic change one startup at a time.  A proverbial statewide Shakedown Street for entrepreneurship.

“I hate slides. I like teams that have a product ready to show, start out with a demo and get straight into who it is for,” the Scobliezer says. “I hate anything that puts me to sleep, and slides often do.”

Help on the Way! - Quipu tosses entrepreneurs a free Pitch App

Quipu Pitch is an easy way for startup teams to build and share video and demonstrations of their innovation to the world and can include an executive snapshot of  the business model, operating plan, team, mentors, milestones, financials and strategy.

Its easy, free, and familiar because it works like popular social networks.  Startups create their own Pitch online and make what they want publicly viewable.  Professors, Investors, Mentors, TA’s and Judges can view, edit, connect, and evaluate startups and be a part of their Feedback Loop.

Pioneer of the one page business plan, Pitch is the update to Quipu EZ plan that brings together  Video, Slides, and Images with the entire suite of Quipu entrepreneurship applications.  Pitch displays the individual Lean Startup processes and business model automatically.

For startup teams of 3 and fewer Quipu is FREE, no limited functionality, and never a charge for Feedback Loop members.

Larger teams, competitions, consultants, educators, enterprises and incubators programs are based on the number of users required and projects managed.  These Subscriptions start at $19.99 per month for teams with up to 10 members and 10 projects.

I have never, as The Paedagogus, so vociferously promoted a product, rather opting to focus on the methods of the pedagogy, but what the hell,  this is Quipu Pitch!

I return from south of the border energized by the social entrepreneurship initiatives that are  driving a community and ecosystem of economic development all over Mexico.

While Cartels and the death squabbles over drug money is the news headline, quietly discussed on campuses across the country, their has been a grass roots movement in innovation and entrepreneurship promulgated by the The Universidad Tecnológica de México (UNITEC) and other forward thinking universities designed to develop a community of entrepreneurship and economic development. Read more..

When GDP is not GDP.

Dr. Raphael Ramirez explained to his MBA students, “Gross Domestic Product (GDP) while seemingly a reasonable tool to evaluate nation economies independently, fails to account for corruption within the respective economy.  Nation States like Mexico and Italy, whose corruption as a percentage of GDP are significantly higher than that of the G20 average are at a distinct disadvantage in the global credit market.”

In Mexico there is a long term view to remedy this.  First, their are those politicians that dare attempt to fight the corruption from the top – which is slow but progressing.  The second is the communities of economic development that are promoting and teaching entrepreneurship with the social responsibility to reinvest back into these communities.

The dual front plan over decades is to erode corruption as a percentage of GDP simultaneously through reinventing the economy from the ground up and mitigating the value of legacy corrupt markets.

“We recognize this is an ambitious social and economic endeavor that requires a boot strap mentality, hyper collaboration, a willingness to support programs on a national level that seek to fail fast and learn from these.  It is a Lean Program”, says Ramirez.

Dr. Ramirez and his contemporaries are taking advantage of MOOC’s, and the rapid digitization of education using cloud and mobile technologies to advance their own pedagogy, and entrepreneurship to disrupt Mexican corruption through innovation.

Y’know the one thing they don’t need is a left-hand monkey wrench.

Minimum Viable Product is about aim small – miss small.  But aim at what? and how do you measure if your MVP is on target?  These are fundamental questions that you need to answer if you are going  to reduce the risk in your startup and certainly if you intend on raising capital.

In Design Thinking, the intersection of Desirability, Feasibility, and Viability is the overlap of what people want, that which is technically possible, and that can be applied as profitable business enterprise is widely considered the target for the MVP.   The degree of overlap in the three, determine the innovation and the size of the Sweet Spot.

Ok we have the target…the Sweet Spot.  Is it big enough?

How do you chart and measure precisely if your MVP is on target?  This is where Customer Development and direct customer participation in the iteration process as an integral feedback component, and the resultant quantifiable analytics can help keep you on track.

Measure qualitatively and quantitatively.  Use rubrics to normalize the feedback and quantify metrics on the target to track progression and compare to the MVP plan.

Quantify the path of the MVP to ensure your on target to hit the design sweet spot.

Call me a whining boy if you will, but with so many roads to the MVP you have to focus on the target, question everything, quantify, measure, and ask for feedback,  then listen to your customers advice!  

Human focused innovation is a radically user centered collaborative approach to creativity and ideation used to determine the feasibility, desirability, and the viability of an idea or project.   When these are then prototyped using LEAN methods of customer participation for the purpose of accelerating iteration velocity towards a product market fit then, in the contemporary vernacular, this is simply referred to as design thinking.

It takes a village.  Ensure that functional teams permit group dynamics to evolve, empathize participation with the target customers directly engaged in the problem solution process and to challenge accepted norms to disrupt big markets.      The schemata is complex with lots of moving parts personalities agendas that require peer based ultra-collaborative openness else it all falls apart.

That’s it isn’t it?  It is why the human aspect counts most in design thinking – radically open communication – not for the faint of heart.  Indeed you and me …and others… are bound to spend some time wondering what to choose.

While passion alone will not a business make, an amazing thing happens when what your love and are good at converge with your vocation.  You work late, can’t wait to get back to it in the morning, and hours fly by as you hone your talent, team and business model.  You sweat the details, share your passion, and enable others to do what they are good at with their passion and that which you foster among your team, customers, and network.

Opportunities today to aggregate people of like mind, communicate and collaborate with them to create a converged business solutions are readily available and the cost and financing to fund these can be available for those who do the hard work necessary to access them.   Educators are actively combining engineering, business, and marketing students to innovate and take inventions to work with industry to create financially viable ventures, jobs, and participants in local, regional, and global economies.

It the same for a local bike shop owner or the next Linkedin, the business model must work.  Lifestyle businesses only support the respective lifestyle if their business model can sustain it and passionate people behind the plan to implement it.   There’s a fire, fire on the Mountain.

Blended learning, the convergence of online, mobile, and face to face education is occurring at higher education institutions everywhere. Research indicates that the amalgamation of curricula with student lifestyle, meaning the student device of choice, improves engagement, maximizes in and out of classroom learning, automates procedural items, and engage students with one another and teachers socially.  Cross curriculum integration of innovation with business teams is rapidly becoming norm in higher education many with set goals to create research driven innovation ventures to drive economic growth.

Policy makers and venture capitalist have responded rapidly by investing at a rate of four times the previous year, and with coordinated policy for research efforts to create the ventures that will lead the next economic boom.   This is not by chance, educators and policy makers alike acknowledge previous lack of coordination may have negatively impacted the economic boom of the nineteen nineties, an oversight they don’t intend on repeating.

Find something that you are passionate about and do it, fail fast, take corrective action, follow you passion, listen to your customers, do your homework, and the chances are pretty good you will find a program that will help you.  Help always goes to those that help themselves first, that is life….get off the ship of fools.

Innovation is the creation of better or more effective products, process, services, technologies, or ideas that are accepted by markets, governments, and society.  It is the widespread impact to society that makes innovation, not invention, so critically important to public policy, education, and economic development – the Macro- Entrepreneurial Trilogy.

Specifically, it is the use of a new idea or method that differentiates innovation from invention, which refers more acutely to the idea creation    Think tanks, like the National Science Foundation and other centers of innovation have long sought to fund the advancement of research, but today  more than ever the linkages to the overall benefit to society and commercialization models are equally important to their efforts.

Gabriel Tarde was the first educator to define the innovation decision process as an iterative series of steps; First Knowledge, Create an Attitude, Make a Decision to Adopt or Reject, Implementation and Use, Confirmation of Decision that today remain the very foundation of Customer Development in Lean Startup thinking.