H27年度山田道場WHAT'S GOING ON 『Lean Launchpad-Customer Development Model-4　Presentation of the result of Interview & Special Lecture＜事業創造実践リーンローンチパッド第4回 仮説検証結果の発表と講演＞』

Facilitators;Takashi Tsutsumi/Masato Iino, Learning Entrepreneur Lab.
＜ラーニング・アントレプレナーズ・ラボ/堤孝志、飯野将人＞

For our 4th Lean Launchpad workshop of the year held on 22/May, we were fortunate to hear from guest speakers Masashi Aono and Melissa Tsang about their experiences with the lean launch pad program.



Melissa is currently earning her MBA from UC Berkeley in California. While there, she participated in the 'original' Lean Launchpad workshop, taught by program founder Steve Blank.

Her group had to fight to get into the program -- only 8 of 60 team applications were accepted -- and from Melissa's description, the pressure never eased off. From the requirement to conduct 10 new face to face interviews every week, to their weekly presentations in the 'shark tank' in front of an extremely vocal and aggressive panel of advisors, to frequent last minute pivots, the entire workshop sounded like an intense learning experience.


Having made it thought the challenge and arrived on the other side with a working startup idea, Melissa had plenty of advice to give us -- at the half way point of our own Lean Launchpad experience. Some of her main points were:

Conducting interviews is not the same as collecting data in a scientific experiment -- one great interview, that gives you an 'aha' moment of insight, is worth much more than the average of all the interviews you conduct. For this reason, it is important to go deep in the interviews, asking broad questions that let you discover the emotional needs of your customers.

Some failure is unavoidable. Sometimes, her group did everything right -- listened to potential customers, built what they asked for, showed them the prototype... and found that they no longer wanted it. However, even though failure is scary, it is an invaluable learning experience. By pivoting again and again, her group was finally able to arrive at a product idea that fit best with both her group's core values and their customers' needs.

Melissa and her team have not yet decided whether to continue work on their startup after completion of the Lean Launchpad program. Howeverthey decide, we wish them the best of luck with their endeavors!

Assoc. Prof. Aono is a Tokyo Tech researcher in the Earth-Life Sciences Institute who is using the Lean Launchpad principles to create a real world application of his research work.



It was fascinating to hear about Prof. Aono's research. He demonstrated a potential new computer architecture that could solve combinatorial-style problems much more efficiently than existing architectures, based on the processing power of a simple biological organism -- a single-celled amoeba. We got to see videos of the amoeba itself being used to solve known problems in computer science, such as the famous travelling salesman problem, and hear about how the biological structure of the amoeba had been adapted into a mechanical device -- a new computer architecture.
Despite capturing our imaginations by showing us some fascinating possible directions that computing architecture could take in the future, Prof. Aono's closing advice was extremely practical and sobering. He helped us to understand that for the purposes of selling a product or service, it didn't matter at all how interesting your idea was if you haven't thought carefully about what the real world applications of your work could be. If you can't clearly demonstrate how your work will meet the practical needs of potential customers, the best you can hope for is for someone to say, "that's interesting" and do nothing.

For this reason, Prof. Aono is using the Lean Launchpad paradigm to his ideas, and encouraged us to do the same.

We thank Prof. Aono and Ms. Tsang for their insights, as well as Takashi Tsutsumi and Masato Iino for their ongoing guidance in each Lean Launchpad workshop.

(Ania Brown, Energy Science, 2014 AGL student)