Just two months old, the Starting Lean course at Dalhousie University is already having an impact on the creation and mentorship of young companies in the region.

In fact, Starting Lean is radically altering the face of Startup Weekend Halifax, in which entrepreneurs, developers and mentors come together for one intense weekend Nov. 16-18 to form businesses. And it is leading to the creation of the Startup Next competition in Halifax in March, the only Canadian component of this international competition.

There are now nine teams going through the Starting Lean course headed by professors Mary Kilfoil and Ed Leach. It’s not a university course where students learn about spread sheets, balance sheets or even about creating technology. They learn human skills – often contradictory skills such as the collaboration needed to build a team and the ego needed to pester a larger business to strike a partnership.   

In particular, the course forces the teams not to write a business plan but to formulate a business model using a “canvas”  -- a tool devised by California tech guru Steve Blank in his course Lean Launchpad. The canvas captures the process of creating the business and it changes as the entrepreneurs learn more about their market. It forces the entrepreneurs to adapt the model based on what they hear from prospective clients and partners.

“The very first thing you put on your canvas is the business plan, but from Day 1 the business plan is just a hypothesis,” said Kilfoil in an interview. “What is different about the business model is you have to get out of the building to talk to customers to test the hypothesis.”

Leach and Kilfoil traveled to San Francisco this summer to study under Blank, and the Dalhousie course is the first in Canada to offer the Lean Launchpad methodology. Leach is now introducing the Lean Launchpad concept into Startup Weekend. Dalhousie is one of 300 sites internationally to offer Startup Weekend, but there will be something unique about the Dal event.

First of all, it’s being held in conjunction with PropelICT’s accelerator Launch36, which has just accepted two of the entrepreneurial teams from the Starting Lean course. Launch36 and Innovacorp together are holding a lean startup workshop presented by Austin, Texas-based tech guru Ash Maurya at the McInnes Room at Dalhousie on Wednesday. (There are tickets available at a cost of $250). Maurya will also appear at Innovacorp’s Business over Breakfast event the next day in Dartmouth.

Startup Weekend will officially kick off on Friday at 6 pm in Room 2600 of the Killam Library.  Anyone can participate (the cost is $99) and can pitch an idea, which is discussed by the other participants. If there’s a feeling in the room that the idea has potential, a team will form around it and work on building it out into a business. Five winners are chosen Sunday night and everything wraps up by 9 pm on Sunday.

This year there is also something different. The five winners of Startup Weekend Halifax will have the chance to enter a special three-week evening course ending Dec. 15, based on the principals of the Starting Lean course.

The most significant development may be that the first Startup Next competition in Canada will be held in Halifax in March. This will be one of 26 Startup Next events around the world,  and the winner will travel to the Startup Next finals in New York.

Kilfoil explained that this is different from a startup contest or business plan competition because it will assess the process the team has gone through to launch the business. It will consider, for example, how it has solicited feedback from the market and changed its business model to suit that feedback.

Given that this is the first year of Starting Lean, the class will not be taught in the second semester. There may be two sessions next year.