Steve Blank
Most large organisations are designed to execute existing business models. The structures and incentives that make execution efficient are the same ones that make serious innovation almost impossible to deploy at scale. The result is innovation theatre: pilots, labs and accelerators that produce activity without changing the operating reality of the company.
Steve Blank co-created the Lean Startup methodology and gives large organisations the operating discipline to innovate at startup speed.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Steve Blank
- Co-creator of the Lean Startup methodology, the operating logic most corporate innovation programmes are now built on, taught by the person who designed it.
- His Lean LaunchPad curriculum became the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps, now the standard for commercialising research at the NSF, NIH and U.S. Department of Energy.
- Co-founder of Stanford’s Hacking for Defense programme and the Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation, with direct experience deploying innovation methodology inside the U.S. defence and intelligence community.
- Twenty-one years inside eight Silicon Valley startups, with four IPOs including E.piphany. He built what he teaches before he taught it.
- Named one of 12 Masters of Innovation by Harvard Business Review and listed on the Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers.
Biography highlights
- Adjunct Professor at Stanford University and Senior Fellow for Entrepreneurship at Columbia University.
- Author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany, The Startup Owner’s Manual, and Hacking for Defense: Innovation Doctrine.
- May 2013 Harvard Business Review cover story, “Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything,” defined the field.
- Co-founder of Stanford’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation; served on the Defense Business Board and the U.S. Navy’s Science and Technology Advisory Board.
- Lean LaunchPad class taught at 75+ universities globally; Hacking for Defense at 70+, with more than 70 dual-use startups and over $350 million in follow-on funding.
- Eight Silicon Valley startups across 21 years, four IPOs, including E.piphany, Zilog, MIPS and SuperMac.
Biography
Startups search for a business model. Large companies execute one. Conflating the two is what makes most corporate innovation programmes underperform: they apply planning, forecasting and accountability tools designed for known businesses to activities that are inherently exploratory.
Steve Blank’s argument, developed across two foundational books and a 2013 Harvard Business Review cover story, is that innovation has to be run as a managed discipline with its own operating logic. The Lean Startup methodology he co-created treats new ventures as a search process, where customer development, hypothesis testing and minimum viable products replace the business plan as the primary instrument of decision-making.
His credibility on this is built from doing the work, not just teaching it. He spent 21 years inside eight Silicon Valley startups, four of which went public, including E.piphany. He then took the same methodology into the U.S. federal system: his Lean LaunchPad curriculum was adopted by the National Science Foundation as I-Corps, now the standard for commercialising research at the NSF, NIH and Department of Energy. His Hacking for Defense programme, co-founded at Stanford with Joe Felter and Peter Newell, has produced more than 70 dual-use startups and over $350 million in funding.
He teaches at Stanford, Columbia and Berkeley, advises the Department of Defense, and co-founded Stanford’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation. Harvard Business Review has named him one of 12 Masters of Innovation; Thinkers50 ranked him among the global top 50. The reason corporate audiences book him is straightforward: he is one of very few people who has built innovation processes that work inside the most rigid bureaucracies in existence, and he can show a senior team how to do the same.
Key speaking topics
- Lean Startup methodology
- Corporate innovation at scale
- Customer development and business model search
- Entrepreneurship
- Disruption and incumbent response
- Innovation inside government and defence
Ideal for
- Chief Innovation Officers and corporate venture leaders
- Boards and executive teams designing or resetting innovation programmes
- Government and defence leaders responsible for technology adoption and commercialisation
- Founders, scale-up CEOs and corporate accelerator leadership
Audience outcomes
- A working distinction between executing a known business model and searching for a new one, with the implications for how each should be resourced, measured and led.
- The operating logic behind customer development, hypothesis testing and minimum viable products as decision-making instruments inside large organisations.
- Examples from the Lean LaunchPad, NSF I-Corps and Hacking for Defense programmes showing how the methodology has been deployed at federal scale.
- A diagnostic for why most corporate innovation programmes produce pilots and proofs-of-concept without commercial outcomes.
Talks
How large companies use Lean Startup techniques and processes to remain innovative under continuous disruption.
Key takeaways:
- Why search-stage and execution-stage activities require different management systems inside the same company.
- How customer development and rapid iteration translate into corporate decision-making.
- What an innovation pipeline looks like when it is run as a managed discipline.
How every U.S. federal research agency adopted Lean Startup methods to commercialise science, and how corporate R&D can do the same.
Key takeaways:
- The mechanics of moving research from laboratory to market using customer development.
- Why the NSF I-Corps model has produced more than 1,400 startups and over $3 billion in follow-on funding.
- How corporates can apply the same approach to their own research portfolios.
How culture, process and people need to adapt in a world of continuous disruption.
Key takeaways:
- Why incumbents fail to respond to disruption even when they see it coming.
- The operational changes required to make a large organisation responsive at startup speed.
- How to build an innovation pipeline that produces commercial outcomes, not just activity.
The origin story of Silicon Valley as an entrepreneurial cluster, and what it implies for building one elsewhere.
Key takeaways:
- The Cold War defence and intelligence roots of the Silicon Valley ecosystem.
- The conditions that allow entrepreneurial clusters to form and the conditions that prevent them.
- What governments and regions seeking to replicate the model are getting wrong.