This Small Business Innovative Research Phase I project aims to provide a cloud based software platform to deliver entrepreneurship education at scale. Innovation is the first step along the journey towards commercialization, job creation and profitability. On a good day this path is dark, winding, uphill and unpaved. At LaunchPad Central, they are rapidly creating the ability to help pave this road to increase the odds of successfully navigating this journey. The data from early stage startups will add to the "intellectual exhaust" allowing for pattern recognition of early warning signs of failure. The LaunchPad Central team has the domain expertise required to architect this platform. Collectively they possess an in-depth understanding of the requirements. A world-class board of advisors including Steve Blank, author of The Four Steps to Epiphany and the Startup Owners Manual (standard entrepreneurship texts across top universities worldwide) gives the company an unparalleled intellectual advantage on best practices to deliver this content at scale. The company has the experience of teaching this process in classroom and synchronous online formats to graduate engineering, MBA students and scientists/researchers from research universities. This has given the team considerable collective intellectual and operational experience.
The broader impact/commercial potential of this project can be significant. The NSF Innovation Corps program has adopted Steve Blank's Lean LaunchPad process in 2011. One hundred NSF I-Corps funded teams have graduated and are on their way to successfully commercializing their lab research. The program is set to scale over the next 18-24 months. LaunchPad Central enables the successful scale of this program for early stage technologies from the top universities to learn how to navigate the financial valley of death as they seek to commercialize their science in scalable and sustainable ways. LaunchPad Central will have a much broader impact for entrepreneurs on Main Street. The Small Business Administration could offer the tools that have been tried and tested by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Decreasing the odds of failure for small businesses (the backbone of the US economy) can have a profound impact on job creation. Scalable startups have historically grown from innovation and entrepreneurship hubs like Silicon Valley, Boston etc. Their software provides the metrics to identify promising entrepreneur across the country and potentially connecting them to mentors and investors in Silicon Valley.
This SBIR Phase I project aims to provide web based software-as-a-service platform to deliver an experiential entrepreneurship methodology at scale. This two-sided platform consists of the tools for entrepreneurs to search for a repeatable and scalable business model and tools for instructors, mentors and portfolios managers to triage for early signs of failure and course correct. The project team is comprised of the chief architect, practitioners, and mentors of the highly experiential Lean Startup methodology. Collectively they possess the domain expertise to build and scale a platform for evidence-based entrepreneurship delivering the methodology and content to a global community of entrepreneurs, investors, and mentors. The two primary outcomes over the duration of the phase I award have targeted the technology research & commercialization goals of the project. The technology research required a data set consisting of teams, instructors and mentors using the platform in real time (as opposed to responding to surveys). The first key outcome was a dataset of nearly 1800 teams searching for a scalable and repeatable business model to commercialize their innovations. These teams tested 45,000 business model hypotheses by conducting over 42,000 customer interviews leading to over 9000 business model hypotheses invalidations (pivots and iterations). Using this dataset we built an alpha version of the algorithm. This algorithm provides a visual indication of the investment or commercialization readiness level of an early stage venture. This is the first SBIR grant award for LaunchPad Central. We possess the vision, passion and the operational discipline to responsibly scale this business from an idea to a venture fundable business.
