Monthly Archives: March 2014

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Beyond the Lemonade Stand: How to Teach High School Students Lean Startups

Steve Blank

While the Lean LaunchPad class has been adopted by Universities and the National Science Foundation, the question we get is, “Can students in K-12 handle an experiential entrepreneurship class?” Hawken School has now given us an answer. Their seniors just completed the school’s first-ever 3-credit semester program in evidence-based entrepreneurship. Students are fully immersed in real-world learning during the 12-week Entrepreneurial Studies course.

Here’s what Doris Korda Associate Head of School and Tim Desmond, Assistant Director of Entrepreneurial Studies did, and how they did it.

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Teaching students to think like entrepreneurs not accountants
We realized that past K-12 Entrepreneurial classes taught students “the lemonade stand” version of how to start a company: 1) come up with an idea, 2) execute the idea, 3) do the accounting (revenue, costs, etc.).

We wanted to teach our students how to think like entrepreneurs not accountants. Therefore we needed them to think and…

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The 9 Best Startup Blogs for Entrepreneurs

David Cummings on Startups

Five years ago I published a list of a few dozen entrepreneur blogs that I enjoyed reading on a regular basis. Over time, preferences and styles changed. Now, I still read ~10 posts on a daily basis but I no longer read 100+ like I used to do. Here are the nine blogs entrepreneurs should read on a regular basis:

These blogs, read using Digg Reader (both in my Chrome browser and the native app on my iPhone), make for quality, fresh content on a daily basis that I find invaluable.

What else? What other blogs would you add to this list of top startup blogs for entrepreneurs?

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What we know about autism: Wendy Chung at TED2014

TED Blog

Wendy Chung. Photo: James Duncan Davidson Wendy Chung. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Wendy Chung of the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative says that she is constantly asked the same question by parents: “Why does my child have autism?” It’s a question that plagues them whether their child has a severe form of autism, to the point of being non-verbal, or a mild one.

“Autism isn’t a single condition. It’s actually a spectrum of disorders,” says Chung. “And like it is a spectrum of disorders, it has a spectrum of causes.”

1 in 88 children is diagnosed with autism. But while it’s often called an epidemic, Chung isn’t so sure that it actually meets the criteria. She shows a graph of the number of diagnoses of autism spectrum disorder per year, and there does indeed appear to be a strong curve upwards, with the bars in recent years towering over those in the past. But this difference could be explained…

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What will blow our minds in the *next* 30 years?

TED Blog

Predictions are a mug’s game. If they come true, you likely didn’t push your thinking hard enough. If they don’t come true, you risk looking like an idiot. Nonetheless, many speakers at the annual TED conference have taken the plunge and proffered thoughts of what the future might look like. The video above takes a quick spin through just some of them, with thoughts from tech pioneers including Nicholas Negroponte, Rodney Brooks, Jeff Han and Pattie Maes.

Below, we asked many of the attendees and speakers at this year’s just-wrapped TED to riff off the conference’s theme (“The Next Chapter”) and tell us what they think might radically change society, life, technology and so on in the *next* 30 years. From funny and wry to deeply insightful, the answers will surprise you.

“One of the things about learning how to read — we have been doing a lot of consuming of…

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