Q A The Tall Task of Getting Big Companies and Government to Innovate Like Lean Startups: Interview with Steve Blank Steve Blank has been at the epicenter of the ‘lean startup’ movement since he ignited it in 2006 with his book The Four Steps to the Epiphany. A Silicon Valley entrepreneur for 21 years who founded or was involved in the launch of eight technology startups (both successes and failures), Blank left that world in 1999 to teach and consult on startups. Today, Blank’s Lean LaunchPad approach (which he teaches at Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and Columbia University) is taught at more than 75 universities worldwide. What’s more, lean startup methods have been embraced by a number of government and scientific organizations. Blank’s Stanford class became the curriculum for the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps in 2011; since that time, over a thousand scientists and engineers have taken the course to help commercialize their ideas. Blank also co-created the Hacking for Defense and Hacking for Diplomacy programs, which use lean startup methods to address critical national security problems. You can read his extensive writings at www.steveblank.com. At the turn of the century, one of Blank’s students was Eric Ries, who launched two companies that Blank had funded. The first practitioner of Blank’s lean startup method, Ries took the concept mainstream after publishing two books, The Lean Startup and The Startup Way.