How to build regional entrepreneurial communities has just gotten it’s first “here’s how to do it” book. Brad Feld’s new book Startup Communities joins the two other “must reads,” (Regional Advantage and Startup Nation) and one “must view” (The Secret History of Silicon Valley) for anyone trying to understand the components of a regional cluster.
https://steveblank.com/2012/10/08/startup-communities-regional-clusters/​

​Almost every large company understands it needs to build an organization that deals with the ever-increasing external forces of continuous disruption, the need for continuous innovation, globalization and regulation.
But there is no standard strategy and structure for creating corporate innovation.
We outline the strategy problem in this post and will propose some specific organizational suggestions in follow-on posts.
https://steveblank.com/2012/12/03/the-future-of-corporate-innovation-and-entrepreneurship/

My friend Ron Ashkenas interviewed me for his blog on the Harvard Business Review. Ron is a managing partner of Schaffer Consulting, and is currently serving as an Executive-in-Residence at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. He is a co-author of The GE Work-Out and The Boundaryless Organization. His latest book is Simply Effective.  For what I had thought were a few simple ideas about taking what we’ve learned about startups and applying it to corporate innovation, the post has gotten an amazing reaction. Here’s Ron’s blog post.
https://steveblank.com/2013/02/23/why-big-companies-cant-innovate/​

​The greatest number of jobs is created when startups create a new market – one where the product or service never existed before or is radically more convenient. Yet this is where startups will run into anti-innovation opponents they may not expect. These opponents have their own name –  “rent seekers” – the landlords of the status-quo.
Smart startups prepare to face off against rent seekers and map out creative strategies for doing so…. First, however, they need to understand what a rent seeker is and how they operate…
https://steveblank.com/2013/06/24/tesla-versus-rent-seekers/

In 2012 I got together with Alexander Osterwalder, Henry Chesbrough and Andre Marquis to think about the Lean and the future of corporate innovation. We had some radical thoughts how companies were going to have change to remain competitive in the 21st century in a blog post. What we didn’t envision was that one creative corporate VP would take that post and build a world-class corporate innovation program around it.
David Butler is the VP of Innovation and Entrepreneurship of at The Coca-Cola Company – responsible for finding breakthrough innovation and building an entrepreneurial culture.  Here’s how he’s shaping the future of corporate innovation.
https://steveblank.com/2013/11/07/lean-goes-better-with-coke-the-future-of-corporate-innovation/

​Since 2005 startup accelerators have provided cohorts of startups with mentoring, pitch practice and product focus. However, accelerator Demo Days are a combination of graduation ceremony and pitch contest, with the uncomfortable feel of a swimsuit competition. Other than “I’ll know it when I see it”, there’s no formal way for an investor attending Demo Day to assess project maturity or quantify risks. Other than measuring engineering progress, there’s no standard language to communicate progress.
Corporations running internal incubators face many of the same selection issues as startup investors, plus they must grapple with the issues of integrating new ideas into existing P&L-driven functions or business units.
​https://steveblank.com/2014/02/25/is-this-startup-ready-for-investment/

​In the last few years we’ve recognized that a startup is not a smaller version of a large company. We’re now learning that companies are not larger versions of startups.
There’s been lots written about how companies need to be more innovative, but very little on what stops them from doing so.
Companies looking to be innovative face a conundrum: Every policy and procedure that makes them efficient execution machines stifles innovation.
This first post will describe some of the structural problems companies have; follow-on posts will offer some solutions.
https://steveblank.com/2014/03/04/why-companies-are-not-startups/

Henry Chesbrough is known as the father of Open Innovation and wrote  the book that defined the practice. Henry is the Faculty Director of the  Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation, at U.C. Berkeley in the Haas Business School.  Henry and I teach a corporate innovation class together.
https://steveblank.com/2014/03/26/why-internal-ventures-are-different-from-external-startups/​

For decades large companies have gone shopping in Silicon Valley for startups. Lately the pressure of continuous disruption has forced them to step up the pace.
More often than not the results of these acquisitions are disappointing.
What can companies learn from others’ failed efforts to integrate startups into large companies? The answer – there are two types of integration strategies, and they depend on where the startup is in its lifecycle.
https://steveblank.com/2014/04/23/corporate-acquisitions-of-startups-why-do-they-fail/

​Startups are not smaller versions of large companies, but interestingly we see that companies are not larger versions of startups.
I’ve been spending some time with large companies that are interested in using Lean methods. One of the conundrums is why does innovation take so long to happen in corporations? Previously Hank Chesbrough and I have written about some of the strategic issues that impede innovation inside large corporations here and here.
Two methods, Design Thinking and Customer Development (the core of the Lean Startup) provide the tactical day-to-day process of how to turn ideas into products.

https://steveblank.com/2014/07/30/driving-corporate-innovation-design-thinking-customer-development/