Nine teams will embark on a 10-week journey to learn the Lean Startup methodology as part of the inaugural class of the UCF I-Corps program beginning January 30, 2015.

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UCF plans to debut its I-Corps program in a big way.  Jerome “Jerry” Engel, Ph.D. – co-founder and leader of the Lean Startup movement – will make special appearances at the UCF campus and at a community mixer downtown, in partnership with Canvs and Starter Studio, to help officially kick-off the UCF I-Corps program.

UCF I-Corps – administered by the UCF Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (UCF CIE) – is a statewide program designed to foster, grow and nurture an innovation ecosystem through partnerships between the National Science Foundation, Florida universities and venture capital and entrepreneurial communities.

Central Florida is poised to become the epicenter of the Lean Startup movement in Florida.

This hands-on methodology emphasizes engagement and experiential study. The approach requires teams of researchers and students to propose and test their business hypotheses in “real-world” scenarios. Industry mentors review findings with students, helping them make appropriate adjustments to their innovation and/or commercialization plan in preparation for bringing their ideas to market.

Ivan Garibay, Ph.D., serves as Program Director for UCF I-Corps.

“The I-Corps program will help promote and facilitate innovation and research throughout the entire state of Florida,” explains Dr. Garibay.  “UCF is honored to have been selected as one of 15 sites I-Corps sites across the nation.  Having the opportunity to bring the co-founder and leader in the Lean Startup movement here to Central Florida solidifies the foundation of this very exciting and promising program.”

Jerry Engel collaborated closely with Steve Blank, chief architect of the Lean LaunchPad method, to help develop the curriculum and co-author the LaunchPad Educators Guide. Engel is a leader in entrepreneurship education, venture capital, corporate innovation and regional economic development. He joined the University of California at Berkeley in 1991 and founded the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship. As an adjunct professor at the Haas School of Business he has instructed in both the School’s MBA and Executive Education programs specializing in Entrepreneurship, New Venture Finance, Corporate Innovation, and Venture Capital. He has taught the Lean LaunchPad at U.C. Berkeley and across the U.S. as National Faculty Director of the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps program, which has trained over 300 teams of the nation’s leading scientists. Internationally he is supervising programs in Asia and Europe.

For more information about UCF I-Corps, please contact us.

What’s the truism about the chance of failure for a random startup? 80 percent? 90 percent? It’s a bleak picture if you’d like to start a technology venture. All the effort, expense, and grind of hours for months on end you’re willing to put into pursuing your dream. Yet the statistics say that dream has an excellent chance of being a smoldering lump in a few years.

Believe it or not, there’s no better time to jump start your dream than now.
Your first task? Embrace failure.

Not for its own sake. But without failure, success is more difficult to find.

We’ll work with you to be sure you fail time and again. It’s part of the plan.

The Lean LaunchPad methodology was adopted by the National Science Foundation for the I-Corps program, in part, because the hypothesis testing core to the LLP approximates the scientific method applied to technology venturing. It’s this testing in the form of Customer Discovery interviews with prospective customers, users, and influencers that provides the feedback for your idea to fail. The current term is “pivot”. Consider a pivot to be a complete or partial failure of the original idea.

The week-by-week process of information gathering integral to the LLP process provides a framework for your idea to fail multiple times in a very short timeframe. More importantly, you’ll fail in a way that’s much faster, cheaper, and painless – except to your ego -than pursuing a startup on your own.

Once you embrace failure and the Customer Discovery process, something amazing often happens about halfway through the course. The pivots stop. You begin to hear the same things from people you talk to. Conversations and reactions become more uniform. You just may have something! A value proposition. Product-market fit. The elements of a business model. And a potential path to success.

Or not. But that’s OK. There are usually three outcomes that you’ll discover when you engage with customers about their needs and issues:

• Your original concept works as you thought! (Usually not)
• Your concept can be adapted to solve a customer problem, but it’s a different customer or problem than you expected. (Often)
• There isn’t an obvious market for your concept just now. (Sometimes)

All these outcomes are positive. If your concept has a chance of success, you’ll know quickly and have a much better idea of its market opportunity. If no current market opportunity exists, you’ll know that quickly as well, without the personal costs that normally accompany business failure.

The UCF I-Corps program. Failure spoken here.

Written by Eddie Hill

Orlando is on a roll. Unlike Disney’s facsimile downtowns, the parade of companies is very real. But like the people moving down those Disney thoroughfares, the dancing in the streets is very real too, thanks to major job creation.

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The week ending November 23 is Global Entrepreneurship Week, a growing international movement highlighting the opportunities and benefits of entrepreneurship. It’s also a time for community organizations assisting entrepreneurs to get visibility for the work they do and redouble their efforts to connect with aspiring entrepreneurs.

In this context, it’s an excellent time to examine the startling acceptance of the Lean LaunchPad methodology. From the first class a few years ago, it quickly became apparent the LLP was a new model to teach entrepreneurs how to evaluate venture opportunities. We stopped thinking of startups as early-stage businesses and saw them as temporary forms within which teams could discover if a viable value proposition and business model existed for their idea. If not, the LLP provides a framework to allow the startup idea to fail multiple times within the span of a few weeks, greatly shortening the time and expense to discover that a new venture has no chance of success. This process to discover the factors underlying the success or failure of a venture idea in such a short timeframe was revolutionary in its simplicity and its impact on entrepreneurship.

Like any good revolution, the Lean methodology spread quickly. The National Science Foundation (NSF) uses the LLP as the foundation for its I-Corps program to promote the commercialization of university research technologies. The LLP was also recently endorsed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for its life science technology commercialization programs. Based on the short, substantial history of success of the LLP in uncovering commercial opportunities, we expect other Federal agencies to endorse the use of the Lean LaunchPad for their research commercialization programs.

Outside of the newer Federal programs, the LLP methodology has diffused into various programs at the K-12 level nationwide. The Lean method of hypothesis testing has proven to be easy to implement and a highly valuable addition to the curriculum. In the spirit of Global Entrepreneurship Week, you may like to know that Lean LaunchPad is going global, too. My Educators’ class at Stanford in April included entrepreneurship educators from:

• Canada
• Mexico
• Portugal
• Colombia
• Chile
• Portugal
• Belgium
• Germany
• UK
• Taiwan
• Japan
• Australia
• And – LAUSD: the Los Angeles Unified School District!

Join us in the global Lean revolution. Submit your venture idea to UCF’s I-Corps program. Applications for Summer ’15 start in January.

We can’t wait to hear your idea!