About the Course

This course provides teams with real-world, hands-on learning experience with customer discovery and successfully transferring knowledge into products and processes that benefit society.

Customer Discovery is an iterative process of physically getting out of the building to interview potential customers and stakeholders to understand their problems and pain points in the market and in society. These interviews, or experiments, lead to real-world learning and insights that validate or invalidate key components of the business model, often leading to pivots.

Teams will spend time talking to and learning from customers, partners and competitors, and learning how to deal with the chaos and uncertainty of commercializing innovations and creating ventures. Teams will be spending a significant amount of time, talking to customers and testing their hypotheses. Class time will be spent on the teams’ key learnings from talking to customers, not what they already knew coming into the course. Teams should be striving for a total of 20 interviews by the end of the course. 

At the opening session, we will explain how to conduct the interviews and more about the expectations. We suggest teams set up potential customer discovery interviews as soon as possible, but do not conduct interviews prior to the course opening. Teams should be researching leads and scheduling appointments, but those interviews will all happen after the opening session.