Hacking 4 Recovery
Instructed by Steve Blank at Stanford University
Throughout his illustrious career, Steve Blank has held a number of titles: he was a military man. A serial entrepreneur. An author. An investor. Perhaps Blank’s most notable moniker, however, is ‘the Father of the Lean Startup Movement’ –– a name he earned after popularizing the methodologies of business-hypothesis-experimentation and validated learning.
Now an adjunct instructor at Stanford University, he goes by another title: Professor.
Hacking 4 Recovery
School: Stanford University
Course: Hacking 4 Recovery
Instructor: Steve Blank
Course Description:
COVID-19 has upended traditional ways of doing business, travel, education, etc. How do these institutions reconfigure themselves? What new businesses, products, and services will emerge? Hacking 4 Recovery provides students with the tools to understand the new normal and to build innovative solutions for recovery.
Stanford’s Hacking 4 Recovery is a 5-day version of the Lean LaunchPad / Hacking for Defense / National Science Foundation I-Corps curriculum that’s trained tens of thousands of entrepreneurs and innovators. This class offers students a unique online opportunity to build the future with the Stanford University instructors who have inspired a generation of entrepreneurs.
Read more here.
Ask the Instructor: Steve Blank
Can you tell me about your experience as an adjunct professor at Stanford University, and about the courses you’ve built there?
Absolutely. About a decade ago I developed a Stanford course called the ‘Lean Launchpad’ class, which was adopted by the National Science Foundation and renamed ‘I-Corps’. The program is supported by the National Institute of Health, funded by the federal government, and now taught at hundreds of universities. The focus of the class is to teach scientists how to commercialize their technology, so it’s really important to the biotechnology ecosystem.
A second national program I built is called ‘Hacking 4 Defense’, which is funded by the Department of Defense and taught at fifty schools here in the United States. Instead of having students come in with their own business or tech ideas, we go to the Department of Defense and ask for problems they’re facing: how to evacuate refugees, how to distribute medical aid, things like that. Then the students work to solve these problems for about ten weeks.
That’s interesting — your students are working to find solutions to real-life challenges that the Federal government has been unable to solve.
I’ve run a number of versions of that class where we’ve gone out to different government constituencies. ‘Hacking 4 Diplomacy’ was in association with the State Department. I designed ‘Hacking 4 Oceans’ and ‘Hacking 4 the Environment’, which are also taught at Scripps College and U.C. Santa Cruz. And at U.C. Berkeley I created ‘Hacking 4 Non-Profits’ and ‘Hacking 4 Cities’, which focus on improving the public well-being.
These classes historically run for a quarter or semester, but I’ve also built a five-day version for students at Columbia University. I’ve been teaching that class for five or six years now. So I’ve had this pedagogy, this framework for the class that I’ve been building for a decade, and that I’ve run all kinds of variants of.
So ‘Hacking 4 Recovery’ is a variant of this class structure, which teaches students how to develop new businesses within the landscape of the pandemic?
Exactly. When the pandemic began I got a few emails from colleagues which said, we ought to do something for the pandemic.
And I went, well, you know, I’m not good at making masks, I certainly don’t know how to make a vaccine, but I do know how to teach people how to build businesses — so maybe we could contribute here.
How does the class work?
The class runs for only five days. Students think about businesses that are struggling with the pandemic and identify a problem that they’re facing: a travel company that is going out of business, for example, or a restaurant that can’t seat customers indoors. In those five days, we teach you how to formulate and test hypotheses, build minimum viable products — prototypes, essentially — and collaborate with these businesses to find real solutions.
We ran that program three times at Stanford. Then the state of Hawaii heard about it, and a number of Hawaiian schools adopted it as well.
I was wondering about the University of Hawaii connection — I know that you’re an adjunct professor at Stanford, do you teach anywhere else?
I’m an adjunct at Stanford, lecturer at UC Berkeley, and senior fellow at Columbia. But other schools have adopted these classes because we’ve made the ‘Hacking For’ program framework open-source, through the National Science Foundation. It’s pretty easy to bring faculty members from other schools up to speed on how to teach the course.
Are you compensated for these programs at the national scale? Do you receive royalties, or anything like that, from other schools adopting your classes?
I write Stanford a check every year. [laughs]
I’ll take that as a no.
You know, I retired a couple of decades ago — God, that’s hard to say. But I’ve spent my life as a serial entrepreneur, so I’m lucky in that I don’t do this for compensation. I teach to pass the torch — it’s my way of giving back to the community that has always supported me.
It sounds like the work itself is extremely important. You’re helping the government, the oceans, with improving sustainability…..
Right. I have a belief that, at some point in life, you need to decide whether or not you’re going to serve people other than yourself. I try to remind my students of that. And these classes, they’re my contribution to service.
You mentioned another course that you teach — ‘Technology, Innovation, and Modern War’.
That course was offered within the International Policy and National Security Department at Stanford. The goal of the class was to help students understand that the Department of Defense is being faced with a set of technology challenges it has never seen before. Commercial technology is now superseding the technologies that the military has built. What are the impacts of that?
We had a set of amazing speakers come into class — two secretaries of defense, General Mattis, Congressman Gallagher, and the general who runs Space Force.
I’d love to have been a fly on the wall for that class.
No need! You can watch the class. I record all of my classes, put them on my website, and summarize the learnings in a blog post each week. So everything my students learn, anyone can learn.
I really appreciate that you provide open-access to your instruction.
Listen, I teach at Stanford. That means that our resources, and our connections, are greater than those at a lot of other schools. I feel strongly that if you’re taking a class from an over-resourced school, and it looks like a class that could be taught anywhere, then the school is not living up to its potential.
I believe that, given the advantages of the resources at Stanford, our job is to set the bar for innovation in classes. But then you think about it — if all we’ve done in these classes is teach thirty-five students, then what real change have we impacted? That would be a waste of time. We’ve open-sourced and shared everything that we’ve done so that other faculty and students at other schools can benefit from our learnings.
Real change happens at scale. •
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