NYU ITP LeanLaunchPad Spring 2014

I’ll be teaching Lean LaunchPad at ITP this spring with Josh Knowles – thanks to all mentors and advisors who have signed up. Still looking for more – local and virtual.

We embrace a creative, iterative, and collaborative approach to making things — but launching a product out into the world takes a somewhat different set of skills. How does one make sure people want to use what they make? How does one create a business plan to support the idea? Is the idea strong enough to turn into a job — or a career? Enter Lean LaunchPad, at NYU ITP – the experiential course in entrepreneurship.

Based on the Steve Blank’s Lean LaunchPad and the NYU Summer LaunchPad Accelerator, we are applying the curriculum developed at Stanford and Berkeley for the NYU community. This course has been developed with support from the NYU Entrepreneurship Initiative, and aims at mixing the best of the methods from the Lean LaunchPad methodology with the best of ITP’s methods. Over the spring semester, student teams participate in an iterative approach to startup development, a combination of business model design + customer development + agile development.

Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Generation is used as the basic framework for business model development. Students work in self-formed teams of 3-4 to develop their business model and product/service over the course of the semester. The primary focus of the course is the work of customer development, speaking directly to potential customer to help define opportunities that the startup is designed to solve. The ITP curriculum will augment the LeanLaunchpad method with additional approaches from design thinking and ethnography to accelerate the understanding of both explicit pain points and more latent or hidden challenges that people face, in their jobs and their lives.

Participants from the NYC Venture Capital community and leading successful startup entrepreneurs will serve as mentors and advisors to student teams. The course is open to all enrolled NYU students.

Students who wish to be considered for the class please form into teams of 3-4 people, and submit your product, concept, and team info here.