When Dalhousie Professors Mary Kilfoil and Ed Leach recently posted a landing page for an innovative entrepreneurship course they’d developed together with their team, they were hoping it would generate some buzz. They didn’t expect more than 85 people to express interest in taking the course titled "Starting Lean’’.

The course, modeled on the methodology developed by U.S. lean startup guru Steve Blank, has created considerable excitement, likely because it demands that students not only study entrepreneurship but, in essence, become entrepreneurs. They must commit either to work on a startup or on a startup team.

What’s more, it is the first course in a Canadian university modeled directly on Blank’s Lean Launchpad program, which stresses the crucial importance of customer development and market validation in the launch of a new product. The Lean LaunchPad, taught at Stanford, Berkley, Columbia, Caltech and adopted by the National Science Foundation, emphasizes learning through experience and immediate feedback to engage students with real-world entrepreneurship. Rather than basing a course on case studies or fixed models, it challenges students to create their own business models based on personal engagement with potential customers.

Later this month, Kilfoil, Leach and Ardi Iranmanesh (an engineer with Quark Engineering who will serve as teaching assistant for the Dalhousie course) will journey to the first Lean LaunchPad Faculty Development Program being taught by Blank at the University of California at Berkeley. This three-day course will be attended by business educators from around the world.

As well as Iranmanesh, Kilfoil and Leach are being assisted by a team of entrepreneurs, including engineers Ben Garvey of Enginuity Inc. and Tim Burke of Quark Engineering and Brian Lowe, a co-founder of First Angel Network and Dalhousie’s Entrepreneur-in-Residence.

The team hopes the new course will make Dalhousie the pre-eminent institution in Atlantic Canada – maybe even the country – for teaching the Lean LaunchPad approach to entrepreneurship.

“This goes well beyond teaching entrepreneurship from a textbook,” said Kilfoil, who teaches at Dalhousie’s Department of Economics and Faculty of Management. “The course is aimed at moving knowledge out of the university and into the marketplace.”

The U.S. National Science Foundation has adopted the Lean Launchpad techniques in its Innovation Corp (I-Corp) program, on which Dalhousie’s course is modeled. The course is not about how to write a business plan. Rather, it requires the participants to validate their business ideas through intense sales calls (some participants have to make 15 hours of sales calls per week) to determine whether end-users want the product, and what they are willing to pay for it.

As described by the I-Corp program, “The end result is not a publication or a deck of slides or even a scientific discovery. Instead, each project team is engaged with industry; talking to customers, partners, and competitors; and encountering the chaos and uncertainty of creating successful innovations.”

What really excites the two Dal professors is the wide range of people who have expressed interest in taking the course.  These include a computer science faculty member who has a product he wants to take to market, three PhD students, several masters students, and undergrads distributed across the management, engineering, computer science, and arts faculties. Several of the applicants have started companies in the past. In addition, local companies have proposed projects that the class could potentially work on.

Kilfoil and Leach say they may tweak the course to come up with a model that better meshes with the culture and business practices in Canada. They will offer the pilot project in the upcoming autumn term, with the expectation that it will become a regular fall and winter offering.