[MUSIC] In this section, we'll move from a discussion of innovation to focusing on entrepreneurship. The two key topics that I want to address are, number one, how we teach entrepreneurship at UC Berkeley. And number two, is the sets of an entrepreneur, the three sets that we focus on which is, skill set, tool set, and in particular, the entrepreneurial mindset One of the questions that I get all the time, I and my colleagues get all the time, is can entrepreneurship be taught? Now, of course I teach entrepreneurship so my answer is going to be yes. But more to the point, can we make a difference in the outcomes of entrepreneurs through the approaches that we use to teach entrepreneurship? And there as well the answer is a resounding yes. So let me start with a little bit of a story, which is going to illustrate how we teach entrepreneurship. How I teach entrepreneurship and also how it helps create better and more relevant outcomes. And there's a lot of changes in the way that we teach entrepreneurship now, as opposed to the way we taught it a number of years ago when I first started teaching this topic. And even more years earlier, when I first started studying this topic. I want to start with a brief story. This is a story about my daughter's 18th birthday, which was not too long ago. And I asked her what she wanted to do for her birthday. This is a picture of us. And she said, she wanted to jump out of a perfectly good airplane and she wanted me to do that with her. And she knew that I would say yes, because I had done that myself on my 18th birthday. So after this picture was taken, not long after this, here's me hurdling towards the ground having just stepped out of a perfectly good plane at 20,000 feet, or 15,000 feet at about 120 miles an hour. Fortunately, with an experienced skydiver strapped very tightly to me. It's great experience. And I got to thinking about how the experience of skydiving was now versus what it was many years ago when I was 18 years old. And then I'm going to draw a parallel to the way that we teach entrepreneurship and how that has changed. My current experience, 20 minutes of training, got in the airplane, jump that day. I had an expert guide with me, everything went great, smooth landing and I got this wonderful freefall of two miles. When I had done in many years ago, we trained for 5 hours. In fact, we trained so long that we had to come back another day. We jumped out of the airplane, but there was no freefall, the parachute immediately deployed. We didn't get that experience of actually skydiving. And what was particularly interesting was the moment we jumped out of the plane the reality of the conditions that we met was fundamentally different from everything we had trained for. We jumped out of the plane, and it turned out there was a breeze, relatively brisk breeze. And it blew us away from the approved landing zone where we were supposed to touch down. In fact it blew us several fields over and we touched down in a cornfield. And my friend ended up in a cast for two months. I was fortunately okay. But what happened was all the training that we had gone through didn't help us one bit. Now, let's talk a little bit about how we teach entrepreneurship and how we used to teach entrepreneurship. When I first started studying entrepreneurship and even when I first started teaching it, the way we would approach this topic was to write a business plan. To come up with a concept, do some market research and write a detailed business plan. We would then use that business plan potentially to raise funds, to build a product, to create our marketing plan which was part of that. And then we would go to market months if not years later and hope we were right. What happens when the business reality was fundamentally different from our assumptions? Well, we would have just wasted a lot of time and money. The way that we currently practice and teach entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley is that we create ventures, and we use these essentially entrepreneurial tools in real time. And this is true for entrepreneurial ventures, but can also be well applied to corporate entrepreneurship, or intrapreneurship ventures as well. Some of those innovation initiatives that we started to talk about. Now this is really important to keep in mind because the challenge that we see in today's arena is that from an entrepreneurial perspective, it may never have been easier to start a business, especially a technology business, than it is right now. Fantastic ideas, access to capital, access to markets, much faster cycle time when we talk about creating products, wonderful resources. And that's also why the second part of this statement is equally true. It's probably never been harder to scale an entrepreneurial venture and succeed, because there's so much competition. And of course that competition just doesn't happen from right next door, but it also happens from halfway around the world. How do we teach innovators and entrepreneurs? How do we teach them to scale in real time? Well we use a really basic iterative approach. If we take a look at this, the first thing we'll do is as we have teams come together with ventures they're working on, we'll introduce new concepts. We'll then have the teams apply those learnings and whatever those concepts are. And I'll go into that in just a minute. And start to create plans, prototypes, go to market strategies. They'll then go out and they'll test those. They'll test those with potential customers, with channels, with other mentors or advisors that may provide that feedback. They'll get feedback from all of those individuals, from those markets. They'll integrate those learnings, they'll iterate it and they'll evolve the venture. And then they'll do it all over again. In fact, in my courses every week we'll introduce, we'll address a new concept. And we'll go through this cycle again and again, building upon the learnings of the week before. All of this, that iterative process, is also part of a more linear process as far as how you think about scaling a venture. And this particular diagram is the high level overview of a program that I helped create called Learn to Launch. And in it we have teams that define their opportunity, that learn about the market, the product market fit what their customers are looking for. That launch, prototype and early stage products, and then as they're successful, they then attract more resources and accelerate and scale. So if we take a look at those iterative processes overlaid upon a progressive scale like this, you start to have a sense as to how we think about and teach entrepreneurship at UC Berkeley.
