Lean at NYU ITP

Starting next Monday – (one week defer thanks to the blizzard) – an open invitation to any entrepreneur, funder, or advisor to startups to visit our Lean class at ITP.

This year we focus not just on lean but on the actual efforts required to develop a product to MVP – and the students will all launch a business while still in school.

Syllabus For Lean at NYU ITP

Instructors: Jen van der Meer, Josh Knowles
Days and Times: Mondays, 6:30 PM-9:00 PM
Location: ITP NYU 721 Broadway at Waverly, 4th Floor Room A/B
Text: Business Model Generation

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 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, and we utilize UX methods and tools to ground students in an understanding of how to successfully move through the early stages of product 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, and early stage product development. The ITP curriculum will augment the LeanLaunchpad method with additional approaches from design thinking, UX, 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.

Learn more on the class blog and contact me if you want to advise, mentor, or tell your story.