After Steve Blank’s fantastic keynote at SynBioBeta London 2014, Lean Launchpad is now back at Imperial College.

The three top startup teams will be sharing their customer discovery journeys--from conception to where they are now. Over the last 12 weeks, SynbiCITE has been running the Lean Launchpad program to bring synthetic biology technologies out of the academic lab and into the commercial sector.“We think you’ve invented the scientific method for entrepreneurship” Errol Arkilic, former program manager at National Science Foundation once said of Lean Launchpad. The method is a way to teach entrepreneurship that’s anything but conventional. Conceived by serial entrepreneur Steve Blank, Lean Launchpad applies the key concepts of the scientific method to startup businesses. By beginning with provable hypotheses, students entrepreneurs build their businesses through a series of experiments and data gathering exercises out in the real world. The method has earned Blank the title of one of the 30 most influential people in technology by Forbes magazine.Although Steve Blank himself initially had long ago said that the method would not work for life sciences, he’s since eaten his own words and has applied the Lean Launchpad methodology to this area at the University of California San Francisco and the National Institutes of Health.Blank is now applying his unique model of customer discovery and business model generation to synthetic biology. At Imperial this February, Blank joined the leadership of SynbiCITE, Steve Chambers, Dick Kitney and Paul Freemont with help from Jerry Engel from UC Berkeley and Itxaso del Palacio, a venture capitalist from Lepe Partners, to launch the first seven student proto-companies. SynBioBeta have been helping to run the course, and this March hosted the teams in the San Francisco Bay Area for an intense week of customer interviews.If you’re attending SynBioBeta London next week then drop by the SynbiCITE exhibit stand to learn more about the program and how you can apply it to your business!