Steve Blank is coming to Halifax.

The father of the lean startup movement will be giving a fireside chat at Dalhousie University on May 30. He will be hosted by Launch Dal, whose founders Mary Kilfoil and Ed Leach adopted Blank’s methodology when they began their pioneering Starting Lean course four years ago.

Blank will be speaking at 4 pm in the Potter Auditorium, or Room 1028 of the Kenneth C. Rowe Management Building. Tickets are free and available here.

Blank teaches entrepreneurship at the University of California Berkeley, Columbia University, New York University and Stanford University.

He pioneered the experimental, evidence-based lean startup movement with his 2003 book The Four Steps to the Epiphany, which outlined what he had learned in than two decades as an early employee or founder of eight different high-tech startups.

The book, which began as notes for an entrepreneurship course and went on to become a global bestseller, said that startups are not just smaller versions of big companies — they need their own tools and processes to move from idea to execution to product.

The Harvard Business Review named Blank one of 12 Masters of Innovation and CNBC recognized him as one of the "11 Notable Entrepreneurs Teaching the Next Generation."

In 2011, Blank created the Lean LaunchPad, an entrepreneurship class that puts customer development and lean business model design principles together in a fast-paced, real-life environment. The model has been adopted at more than 75 universities around the world. It has become the standard for the commercialization of science in the U.S. and is driving defense innovation in the U.S. The methodology is embedded in Dalhousie’s Starting Lean course and Launch Dal’s entrepreneurial programming.

“A number of enterprises have sprung from this multidisciplinary initiative on campus — including biomedical, big data and innovative product design companies — and many of the program’s students have stayed in Nova Scotia and become part of the entrepreneurial ecosystem helping drive the province’s economy,” said Kilfoil in an email. 

Blank will have a full agenda when he's in Halifax. I had the pleasure -- and I mean that literally -- of seeing Blank judge a pitching competition in Ontario two years ago. What's striking is how he can burrow into the guts of a startup just by asking a few questions. He's definitely someone to listen to if you can make the event on the 30th.