The Lean Innovation Educators Summit: Lessons from Teaching in the Pandemic
Over 400 Educators share their experiences teaching Lean in the virtual environment.
More than 400 educators from 100 universities across the globe gathered online for the Lean Innovation Educators Summit on July 24 to share best practices and lessons learned from adapting their entrepreneurship education courses in the midst of the pandemic.
Hacking for Defense final presentation.
The Common Mission Project administered the virtual, mid-year check-in with Lean educators to share best practices in teaching the Lean LaunchPad methodology and to cultivate a Lean Innovation Educators community and build resiliency in these challenging times. The Summit was hosted by Lean Startup creator Steve Blank, Jerry Engel, Pete Newell, Steve Weinstein with Business Model Canvas creator Alex Osterwalder, and Grant Warner. Educators who teach Hacking for Defense, Lean LaunchPad and other entrepreneurship courses including the NSF Innovation Corps tuned in from 22 countries, representing universities including Stanford, Columbia, and others.
This event was built on the inaugural Lean Educators Summit held this past December in Palo Alto, CA, and hosted by Steve Blank. The goal of these events is to bring Lean educators together to discuss what it’s like to teach Lean, and the impact Lean practices have had on the classroom and beyond. The focus of the July event was to understand how entrepreneurship education has changed as a result of the pandemic, and allow educators to share tools and resources for teaching in a largely digital learning environment.
Event hosts Steve Blank, Jerry Engel, Pete Newell and Steve Weinstein with featured speakers Alex Osterwalder and Grant Warner.
Pete Newell, co-creator of the Hacking for Defense course, spoke about converting and scaling existing Lean programs based on his experience adapting and expanding Hacking for DefenseⓇ. Steve Weinstein shared his experience creating Hacking for Environment: Oceans, at the University of California San Diego and the University of California Santa Cruz amid the pandemic. Steve Blank discussed the launch of the Hacking for Recovery program at Stanford University, a new program designed to use the Lean methodology for economic recovery. Grant Warner discussed responding to societal changes through entrepreneurship and diversity, equity and inclusion work within the entrepreneurship community. Finally, Alex Osterwalder shared his perspective on how to best adapt the Business Model Canvas to continue to support students’ progress through virtual courses. To learn more, take a look at our event slide deck.
After the hosts spoke, attendees took part in breakout sessions to engage in small-group conversations and share experiences from teaching Lean during the largely virtual spring semester. See the key takeaways from each breakout room, in our summary slides. Many attendees cited the opportunity to connect with other Lean educators as a highlight of the event.
Alex Osterwalder responding to attendee questions.
Beyond the Summit, the Lean education community continues to engage and share resources via the community Slack channel and the Lean Innovation Educators’ Resource Hub. This Hub will be a continually growing database of resources created by The Common Mission Project that will soon be scaled into a searchable database for Lean LaunchPad education tools.
The next Lean Innovation Educators Summit is planned for December 16, 2020. To stay informed about the December Summit, sign up for our Common Mission Project Newsletter on our website’s Summit page.
Thank you to our outreach sponsors, GCEC and VentureWell.
A special thank you to our sponsors, hosts, and all of the moderators that participated and helped make this event a success. If you missed this event and would like to watch the Summit, a recording is available here.