As Lean LaunchPad, the course I teach at Columbia Business School, completes its third year in the School’s curriculum, the “lean startup” has clearly found a home at Columbia, with more than 500 students from across the University exposed to the rigorous methodology pioneered by the popular block week instructor (and my Startup Owner’s Manual coauthor), Steve Blank.

Lean LaunchPad is based on the widely adopted customer development method Steve spent a decade developing, refining, testing, and teaching — after some 30 years spent building eight startups, including his last meteoric IPO. While it’s hard to detail in a few words, this method guides disruptive innovation in both startups and big, established companies alike. It’s a test-and-iterate system similar to the scientific method, exposing every aspect of the startup or business unit to customers within days of launching the new business.

Much of the core methodology has proven as useful and exciting to students headed to Citibank, Goldman, or GE as it has been for those who are launching or growing new companies. Here are key guiding principles of the approach:

  • Most startups fail, not for lack of tech or creativity, but for lack of customers — so engage the customer in developing the business vision from day one.
  • Customers don’t read business plans, so why spend months writing one? Use a simple, shorthand “business model canvas” — a visual chart that describes a firm’s value proposition and key parameters — to identify hypotheses you need to test.
  • Successful businesses demand much more than great products. Marketing, channels, pricing, partners, and more can be tested and iterated long before launch so that you know what will work when the business is ready to go.
  • Your customers’ opinions are the only ones that matter, so get out of the building! (this is the method’s mantra.) Get face-to-face with as many customers as possible.
  • Use the learning to evolve, iterate, or “pivot” (the startup term du jour) the business model to eliminate failure points long before the product or business is launched.

Few if any Fortune 500 companies have done this better than GE and its energy systems business unit. Driven by GE’s passionate lean practitioner Prescott Logan, coached by Steve and myself, this “startup” used global customer feedback to develop its innovative sodium industrial batteries. In about four years, the approach has helped the unit skyrocket from an idea and some chemistry to revenues approaching $100 million, with much more growth ahead.

Bob Dorf is the coauthor (with Steve Blank) of The Startup Owner’s Manual (K & S Ranch, 2012) and has taught entrepreneurship at Columbia Business School since 2012.