EVENT: LEAN @ ITP

Come hear directly from Jen van der Meer as she promotes this upcoming 2 week intensive workshop happening at ITP this January, 2016.

What: Lean @ ITP
Instructors: Jen van der Meer, Christin Roman
When: Two weeks in January, 11-22
Location: ITP

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 figure out how to support an idea with the right business structure? Is the idea strong enough to turn into a job -- or a career? Enter Lean at NYU ITP – the experiential workshop in entrepreneurship.  (Please note:  this is a non-credit opportunity, it does not provide degree credit toward the ITP degree).

Who is this for: any student who wants to pursue a path to entrepreneurship, or work in an entrepreneurial company

Format: 2 intense but fun-filled weeks in January with daily 1.5 hour orientation sessions and feedback each day, followed by outside in field ethnography and customer research.

Fee: Cost for the workshop: $200. Student fees will be pooled into a prototyping and marketing experiment fund - to run those first critical tests on the path to user growth and revenue. The fund will be made available to those student teams that show focus, commitment, and progress towards understanding their customer. 

Modeled after Steve Blank’s Lean LaunchPad and the NYU SummerLaunchPad Accelerator, we are applying the curriculum developed atStanford and Berkeley for the NYU community. This workshop has beendeveloped with support from the NYU Entrepreneurship Initiative, and aims at mixing the best of the methods from the Lean LaunchPad methodology with the spirit of ITP's emphasis on exploring the imaginative use of technology to augment people’s lives.

Over a two week program in January, student teams participate in an iterative approach to startup development, a combination of customer development + business model design + personal exploration to determine the most viable business scenario for their ideas. Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Generation is used as the basic framework for business model development, and we utilize interaction design methods and tools to ground students in an understanding of how to successfully move through the early generative stages of product
development.

We will facilitate and organize student teams of 3-4 to develop the company concept and business model over the two week course. 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, and early stage product development. The ITP curriculum will augment the Lean method with additional approaches from generative design, UX, 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 workshop is open to all enrolled NYU students.

Please indicate interest by signing up here (official registration to follow) 

or email Jen van der Meer at jd1159@nyu.edu with questions.