The fourth summit of global lean entrepreneurship educators was held virtually from UC Berkeley on June 3rd. Hosted by Haas School adjunct emeritus Jerry Engel, there were over 300 lean innovation educators online.
Following their productive format, the keynote speaker, Dr. Laura Tyson, Distinguished Haas Business School Graduate Professor and former Obama and Clinton administrations economic advisor, gave a talk centered on the pandemic impact and the end of real interest rates. Her lasting changes from COVID-19 are a hybrid from work-from-home, e-commerce “blowning-away” real commerce, and A. I. (artificial intelligence) as a business model going forward. She also thought some of the coming increases in productivity could be mirrored and adapted by small business.
As host Engel wrote, “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.” Each successive summit has expanded the reach of evidenced-based entrepreneurship.
After the Tyson keynote, there were lean educator leaders (many of whom were original I-Corps program founders) impressions for the current landscape including:
Pete Newell and Steve Weinstein reported on the Common Mission growth, now including use of lean launch for the environment (oceans) as well as Hacking for Defense Hacking (H4D®) a university course sponsored by the Department of Defense.
Finally, educators were broken-out into smaller rooms which reported back conclusions -lean is now a truly international community, new disciplines have been created like more student-centric modes, more specific than general each with its own set of solutions.
Here is the full recording -keynote first 37 minutes, the panel of 7 at 45 minutes, discussion groups wrap at 1 hr:12 minutes (valuable). Hope you can join the group at their next summit on Dec. 2nd. Editor