Is Lean Startup Really a Thing?

Featured Guests:

Jesse Wolfe - Founder / President, O'Dang Hummus

Cameron Ford - Director, UCF Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership

Michael Pape - Dr. Phillips Entrepreneur in Residence; Lecturer, Management

Donna Mackenzie - Executive Director, StarterStudio

Carol Ann Dykes Logue - Site Manager, UCF Business Incubator

Episode Transcription:

Voice:                                "If you build it, he will come."

Terence Mann:                "He will come, Ray. He will most definitely come."

Paul Jarley:                       That's my favorite line from Field of Dreams. But, what if you can't build it?

Jesse Wolfe:                     It came out to a $700,000, almost a million dollar, order. And they needed them to be about $10 a cart and I could not figure out how to get them below $25 a cart.

Paul Jarley:                       Or, what if they don't come?

Cameron Ford:                The Google Glass, people started using it out in public and stuff like that, and quickly were scorned as being what were described as Glass-holes. My understanding is they pulled from the market.

Paul Jarley:                       Lean start up offers a different approach, but is it really a thing? Or, is it just academics hyping the scientific method?

Paul Jarley:                       This show is all about separating hype from fundamental change. I'm Paul Jarley, Dean of the College of Business here at UCF. I've got lots of questions. To get answers, I'm talking to people with interesting insights into the future of business. Have you ever wondered, is this really a thing? Onto our show.

Paul Jarley:                       This is how significant businesses started back in the day.

Michael Pape:                 What we were, I'll just say, required to do as an entrepreneur with VCs with trying to get, maybe, economic development funds.

Paul Jarley:                       Yup.

Michael Pape:                 And this was in the biotech space.

Paul Jarley:                       That's Dr. Michael Pape, Professor of Practice here in the College of Business, and Director of our UpStarts program.

Michael Pape:                 So it was a tech-oriented business that I've been involved in, was write the business plan, and I have sat down, myself and with my teams, of writing the 40 to 60 page business plan. The fat startup, if I may define it that way, had you do that. Venture capitalists would request it, and they would want to make sure that you saw the plan from beginning to end.

Paul Jarley:                       Then a funny thing happened starting in the early 1990s. Universities started to develop entrepreneurship programs. They did this partly to serve their economic development missions, partly because donors loved to give money to this cause and partly because more and more students became interested in entrepreneurship as a career path.

Paul Jarley:                       In the early 1990s, ideals spun out of Stanford, with an emphasis on design thinking. Another decade passed and Berkeley started developing what has come to be known as lean start up. It had a coming out party in 2011, with the publication of Eric Riles book by the same name. But, are universities and business schools really the place to launch business startups?

Paul Jarley:                       I had my doubts. We excel at getting rule followers great jobs in companies who are looking for functional talent. We really aren't geared up to help people who want to color outside the lines, pursue their crazy dreams, even when people say they're wrong. That said, a quarter of my students say they want to start a business,