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.

.

Here are the slides:

8 principals for designing for dignity in health tech

I look forward to meeting you all at StrataRx today - and will post slides and eventual video here.

Lifecycle and Flows will expose students to the hidden forces behind how consumer objects are made. Systems Thinking, Life Cycle Analysis, and Stakeholder Management Theory will be used as frameworks for understanding the industrial process. Deeper exploration of Life Cycle Analysis will expose students to the ecological, social, and financial impact of a consumer product across the full product lifecycle. Students will gain skills in critical analysis, business logic, design research, and thing-making consciousness.

I was obsessed with product backstories and  book years ago when I left frog design to do my own innovation consulting work, and taught a class on backstories at ITP for a number of years inspired by Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things. I’m thoroughly foregrounded in health, tech, and open data, and will have a point of convergence in this course as a few of the students will be hacking, deconstructing, and thoroughly investigating the product history of health and wellness tracking devices. These days, we are badass, putting sensors into EVERYTHING. What would be superbadass: understanding the human and environmental impact of sensors, everywhere, and tasking these sensors with telling the whole truth.

Double Loop Learning

I’ve been thinking about life logging since the year 2001 - when I had the opportunity to work on the Stress Eraser with an extraordinary team at Frog Design’s New York studio. I was the Managing Director but thanks to a post 9/11 effort to make the organization lean, I got to roll up my sleeves and do project work. Before there was Quant Self and the Lean Startup Experience, we had been engaged to work with a single company founder to build a product and help devise a business for breathing coach device that measured heart rate variability. We applied design thinking techniques- building a hypothesis of the target persona, and interviewing people directly.

In fact, we helped devise what would now be known as a pivot. Our founder entrepreneur had envisioned designing this device to meet the needs of yoga instructors, who would then recommend this device to their client base. But each yoga instructor we met rejected the idea of a device guiding the breathing and relaxation experience. Instead - yoga instructors sought mindfulness - a state of not having to be data driven, and in fact not having to use cognition to achieve a state of rest.

So we then went to the opposite of mindfulness - people who suffered anger management and anxiety issues, who had actually been diagnosed by a clinician and who were advised a course of treatment. While the tenor of these conversations was challenge - it took a while to establish trust and get to the underlying issues, we realized we had found a deep, truly unmet need. These potential customers were struggling to access a sense of themselves that would provide a window into their condition. When we finally tested the prototypes, it was often the first time this cohort was able to connect the effect their actual breathing had on their sense of stress level and anxiety.

Mindfulness Quantified Self Continuum

The ultimate health was to never need such a device, but there was a substantial and likely growing group of people that needed this assist to cross the chasm - from non awareness to initial awareness. In systems thinking this is called double loop learning  where participants not only get feedback on their decisions and consequences, but over time change their mental models and decision rules. Yet for someone who has a lifetime of unhealthy breathing, eating, or exercising, it may mean that life change will require continuous support for this learning process. (More on single and double loop learning here in a course I teach at NYU ITP - Bodies and Buildings) and this study of meditation and mindfulness by Jerath Barnes and Wright in Frontiers in Neuroscience.

Flash forward to today, and the next 3 years of massive change in the health care sector, and we will see many startups and large companies repeat this exercise, getting that initial target customer wrong, over estimating the desire of people to be gamified into sleeker, healthier, smoke free versions of themselves, and using the wrong triggers. So how to think about the opportunity? Design for Mindfulness. Erika Carlson at Washington University in St. Louis recently published an excellent study on mindfulness as a goal. Drawing from cognitive, clinical, and social psychology, Carlson outlines a theoretical link between mindfulness and self-knowledge that suggests focusing our attention on our current experiences in a nonjudgmental way could be an effective tool for getting to know ourselves better. We will not truly move to a data-driven, transparent future of reduced cost, improved patient experience, and improved health outcomes (The Triple Aim) until we are first able to reach people at the right point on the mindfulness continuum.

]]> http://jenvandermeer.com/2013/07/disrupting-the-self-lifelogging-wearable-computing-and-society/feed/ http://jenvandermeer.com/2013/06/the-best-of-strata-santa-clara-2013-data-is-not-a-business-model-moving-knowledge-to-action/ http://jenvandermeer.com/2013/06/the-best-of-strata-santa-clara-2013-data-is-not-a-business-model-moving-knowledge-to-action/#comments Fri, 28 Jun 2013 13:14:47 +0000 jendv http://jenvandermeer.com/?p=282

Didn’t get to Strata this year?

Update July 2, 2013: My talk is now available on YouTube:

My talk is being broadcast at an upcoming Webinar brought to you by O’Reilly:

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

5 AM San Francisco | 1pm - London | 8am - New York | 10pm - Sydney | 9pm - Tokyo | 8pm - Beijing | 5:30pm – Mumbai

Big data does not necessarily lead to big business outcomes. It is a rare business leader who even asks the biggest questions of what big data can do. Everyone is looking for ways to define data as an asset that can be monetized. But data itself will never move the needle for the Fortune 1000. Data is a means to an end. The end is not just insight, or knowledge, or brief moments of wisdom (when marveling at gorgeous data visualizations). The end we seek is wise action.

Looking at examples from health care, advertising, open government, publishing, and financial services, I will contrast the current approaches of big data business models with a more innovative, scalable, and effective action-oriented approach.

I will outline the key pitfalls data geeks fall prey to, and how you are most certainly too smart for your own good when talking to us MBAs. I will show how your service can deliver evidence-based decision-making to the people that matter on the front lines, and at the highest levels of the organization. I will also show you how to design data services that get people to care about their jobs, and their contribution to their company goals.

This talk will help anyone who is tasked with determining how to get more business action out of data.

Register here for the webinar.

My original presentation slides are available on Slideshare.

And I’ll be at StrataRx this coming September.

We are all entrepreneurship-leaning educators at the grad and undergrad level, and there are a number of regional accelerators and incubators who teach methods. The best components of this program: the course materials, curriculum, handbooks for teaching are all available publicly, with back up video support and class room examples. Underwritten by the NCIIA, a not for profit organization that has also funded this approach to be delivered to National Science Foundation grantees. It is available here: Lean LaunchPad Educators Program.

But the richest conversations are occurring amongst participants who have adopted or are considering a Lean LaunchPad approach. Hopefully today we will get into the following topics:

• Adapting Lean LaunchPad for Social Entrepreneurship.
• The perceived conflict between Design Thinking  and Lean - the perception that design approaches “take too long” was shared by Steve Blank - yet Eric Reis and others have referenced design thinking approaches as part of the core building blocks of lean startup.
• Adapting Lean LaunchPad for startups in regulated industries - where does FDA fit into to a medical device or mHealth startup.
• Recognition that the educator techniques borrow from Art and Design school methods of critique, and classroom dynamics shift from the professor as pedagogue to a team learning approach. Charrette-style.

Looking forward to today’s discussions.