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1. Lean Innovation Educators Summit
Breakout Room Discussion Slides
Summer 2020 Lean Educators COVID-19 Dialogue

2. Breakout Room 1 - Ali Hawks
Key Findings:
● Online teaching may change the role of the educator to that of coach and
understanding not only how your your students may learn as a result but how your
teaching style may change.
● Increased complexity level that comes with the vastness of tools and technology
● Recorded student lectures allow those students who must work instead of attend
class due to changing personal economics of COVID, get access to the lectures
● Increase the frequency of check-ins, but keep them brief
● Increase the number of mentors if possible, to keep the teams motivated
● Pay attention to the chat in online teaching (e.g. in Teams) which can be
incorporated into the discussion and is better than “cold calling” during virtual
teaching
● Less is more, giving students increased space for discussing
● Don’t assume students want to adopt and adapt to technology
● Don’t lose sight of the ecosystems that keep innovation going; try to replicate meet
ups on Facebook Pages, for example, or monthly virtual coffees

3. Breakout Room 2 - Bob Dorf
Problems/Challenges:
● Physical prototypes, particularly with teams dispersed and away from equipment
● Training luddite professors in all the whizbang Zoom and similar virtual tools
● Maintaining energy and interaction in large and small groups of students
● Developing alternative interview techniques vs face-to-face
Ideas/Suggestions/Recommendations:
● BEST: before interviewing, create a four-panel “graphic novel” showing discovery
objectives, approach, agenda, etc…review in class before using
● Resource training for instructors critical to student engagement, success
● Events, happy hours, etc to build community feel among accelerators
● “Virtual Insani-TEA” theme very effective for UK/London happy hours!
● Use online tools to encourage introvert engagement, participation
● Run regular “AMA” open ask-me-anything sessions/discussions
● Do “short(er) discovery sprints,” i.e. ”go talk to five people and report back”
● Lean harder on referral sources for discovery targets; give them pre-written
intro/referral emails to make it easier for others to recruit for you
● Conduct lots of small group sessions/1on1s/more, shorter office hours to keep
students engaged and communication lines open

4. Breakout Room 3 - Chris Taylor
Key Findings:
1. Office hours for teams and general Zoom tech challenges. Tech in general.
2. Prep work really helped students prepare for first session. TAs are a necessity.
3. Slack and Zoom work well when used together. Some students like to write more
than talk on Zoom.
4. Public funders v. private funders. Public funders wait while private moves forward.
5. More discussion on recruiting methods across the community.
6. Online learning – keep everything live, don’t use recordings for classes.
7. One-on-one interaction makes a real difference.
8. Can’t take what you do in the classroom and transfer it into the online version.
9. University instruction in online teaching would be great!!!!
10. Never just cancel just because it’s easier. Make it work!!!!!! NEVER cancel.
11. Unique constituencies such as rural and dense urban populations who may not
have access to Internet, laptops, etc.
12. Does COVID necessarily reduce the number of interviews required? Go WIDE and
go BIG from the beginning!

5. Breakout Room 4 - Dave Chapman
Challenge #1: Managing Delivery & Managing tech/tools
Solutions/Opportunities:
- Need “extra hands”. TA’s vital for good synchronous sessions.
Challenge #2: Managing Students (forming international online teams,
encouraging online engagement, monitoring engagement)
Solution/Opportunities:
- Recruit lots of guests for online “fireside chats.”
- Grade “class participation.”
Challenge #3: Managing Resources (Which tools/tasks work, sharing
knowledge)
Solution/Opportunities:
- Repository of tools and activities.
- Room for focused “communities of practice” e.g. female entrepreneurship.

6. Breakout Room 5 - Jim Chung
▪ Engagement of Students w/ Online
Teaching
▪ Creating Connections
– Student-Instructor
– Student-Student
▪Reduced Research Activity
▪Customer Discovery w/o Travel/In-
Person Interviews
▪Bureaucratic
– Instructor Contracts
– I-Corps Grant Spending Restrictions w/o Travel
▪ Communicating Course
Expectations
▪ Lectures/Curriculum
– Shorten/Break Up Lectures
▪ Chat
– “Chat Bomb” (students instructed to type chats
but not hit enter until prompted by instructor)
– Dedicated instructor monitors chat to include
key points and questions
▪ Mentors
– Greater Reliance on Mentors as Extensions of
Teaching Team for More Individualized Attention
▪ Breakout Rooms
– Frequent Breakouts with Facilitation by Mentors
and Student Deliverables/Report Outs
– Roundtable Speed Dating with Different
Mentors/Topics
Challenges Engagement Tools

7. Breakout Room 6 - Jeff Epstein
Biggest challenges under COVID-19:
1. Keeping students engaged; judging how engaged they are
2. Under tremendous stress. Family members are suffering financially and clinically.
3. Maintaining that shared learning experience/networking etc.
4. Instructors have challenged delivering content over Zoom/ Zoom fatigue
5. The lack of social cues in the virtual environment.
6. Business ideas which can't work during COVID, such as gyms
7. Trust building is the greatest challenge right now
Solutions
1. We do a peer-review process by assigning specific students to peer teams as
Business Advisors. They are told to handle it as if they were with Deloitte or E&Y
and were offering paid consulting advice. And they get graded, so they take it
seriously.
2. Don't speak for more than 15 minutes; avoid long lecturing
3. Use virtual worksheets
4. In this virtual setting we have found that most work happens in office hours. We’ve
shorted the class time and extended individual office hour time.

8. Breakout Room 6 - Jeff Epstein (Continued)
Solutions
5. Thinking through exercises in bite sized pieces. Slow down the content and have
them work on an exercise in class and then talk more to it in office hours.
6. Combination of synchronous and asynchronous learning.
7. Form teams in advance, not during class
8. Even more important to have a participant list in front of you and call on people to
participate.
9. Use tools: Strategyzer, Slack, and G-Suite.
10. Teams need to have diverse skills, eg, one with right side of canvas, one with left
side
11. Don’t force people to be on teams.
12. Allow space for participants/students to connect about something other than the
actual content. I.e. connecting over what their favorite TV shows are, etc. =
Community/team-building

9. Breakout Room 6 - Jeff Epstein (Continued)
13. The radical candor part of the I-Corps process works better in person because
you can gauge reaction and reorient more effectively - sometimes it gets complicated
in the online space due to lack of eye contact.
14. For networking I ensure that I ask my companies to share their learnings each
week, and “force” Q&A. I have companies ask for connections so they can learn from
each other privately.
15. “Feedback Fallacy” is a great read. https://hbr.org/2019/03/the-feedback-fallacy
16. Direct feedback is difficult on Zoom
17. What we do now is ask students to post in the first week a brief description of
themselves. We ask them to imagine themselves on a team that got an A. They
explain the role and working style of each person on the imaginary team. This
models best behavior and also reveals the working style of each person. The type
As and laid-back people are clear. That prevents combat between two type As on
one team and also allows students to pick a compatible person. They also describe
their background, time zone, etc.

10. Breakout Room 6 - Jeff Epstein (Continued)
18. Alex Cowan's 20-minute business model page is fantastic for new students.
https://www.alexandercowan.com/business-model-canvas-templates/
19. We had to build more cultural sensitivity. Not all communities are used to direct
feedback.
20. Critically think through small worksheets that can be filled out 5-10 minutes, and
then shared and used as part of teaching moments.
21. Create smaller startup teams of 2 or 3 people rather than 4 to 6 people.
22. Allow time for students to connect over things other than just the content (water
cooler effect). Studies of engaged communities of learning have shown this leads to
deeper sustained online engagement more than any other variable.
23. My course has no more than two people, though other sections have as many as
four.
24. Have a large set of innovations in the early days or weeks before paring them
down to 1 or 2 .

11. Breakout Room 8 - Jim Hornthal
1. New Activity Metrics: Pivot Ratio
Measure Invalidated / Validated Hypothesis metric - identify teams that are on (or off)
the rails sooner. Relative and Absolute Indication of Learning by Measuring Velocity of
Change in BMC.
2. New Engagement Metrics: Peer Comment Leaderboard
Teams Pick Best 3 Peer Comments from Cohort which are measured, scored and
shared. Great way to calibrate “participation” grade - harder when not in a physical
space.
3. TA Skill Development: TA Training Webinar/Workshop to Share Best Practices
4. Online Fatigue: Outside Speakers, Frequent Breaks, Polling and Breakout Rooms
5. Customer Discovery Workshop: Held prior to 1st Class to hit the ground running
6. Polishing Right Side of Canvas Workshop: Time permitting, semester easier
than Quarter System.

12. Breakout Room 9 - John Blaho
Main focus of group discussion was on Engagement. We agreed on three “Lessons
Learned”s to share.
1. Whatever style course you use, you must engage cohort as early as possible.
Some instructors contact teams before cohort starts. In main / breakout rooms,
suggest always starting with an activity - otherwise you may lose participants.
2. We focused a lot on breakout rooms. BP was that sessions must be well thought
out, organized, and transparent. LL - you need to put a lot of energy into doing these
correctly. The group all wanted to use while board activities but could not agree on
which platform (Miro, Mural, etc.) is best - seems to depend on your own use case.
3. The final area focused on keeping teams that are not presenting engaged during the
session. Those teaching virtual classes made students write reports on what others
said. Those running I-Corps-like cohorts suggested randomly calling on "quiet"
participants to ask their advice on what someone else just presented. The LL here is
that after doing this a couple of times, everyone becomes active (so as to not get called
on?).

13. Breakout Room 14 - Phil Weilerstein
Biggest Challenges
1) Engagement and making lasting connections
2) Getting out of the building will be harder to support, they will need help to make connections
→ Some found that virtual worked well – Zoom as an LMS platform helps with interactivity / running startup
weekend programs in Zoom.
3) Challenges with bandwidth and interactivity – even on campus electronic and bandwidth logistics.
4) Distraction is a problem – needing to force engagement and draw people out.
Zoom is a great democratizer – but has deficiencies so using multiple tools (Slack for chat, Mural etc.)
Cognitive load is much higher (esp for instructor) – multiple monitors and multiple platforms –
Practices
● Multiple monitors
● Multiple tools simultaneously for different purposes
● TAs and Volunteers
● Microsoft TEAMs to provide a shared workspace for teams – enabling sharing of files and materials
● Discussion forums to replace class participation and keep the dialog going (eg - Canvas)
● Mural or Miro – but make sure you take time to orient and pre-load content
● NearPod.com – allows simultaneous work
● Have another person who can manage the activities in the background – enables you to have a focus on
the students faces during the presentation.
● Discord https://blog.discord.com/how-to-use-discord-for-your-classroom-8587bf78e6c4

14. Breakout Room 14 - Phil Weilerstein (cont.)
AVOID
● Don’t assume that prior practices will work in a virtual environment.
● Avoid video streaming on a stream (technical issues)
● Evaluate after use and adapt iteratively
● Use security in advance avoid open entry (Zoom Bombing) – keep camera on and use waiting
room to vet people prior to starting.
● Too much lecturing with one voice solution → Bring new collaborators in. Vary the voices at the
‘front’ of the room and take advantage of virtual environment.
● Get help with tech – esp if there are a large # of people.
○ TA or Tech Assistant – doesn’t have to be a teaching oriented person – can use an admin
person or a student intern
● Building prototypes is a real challenge – some solutions from require them to do at home to have
them send a design file to a fablab to be printed
● GIVE STUDENTS THE SPACE TO BE CREATIVE AND THEY MAY SURPRISE YOU
● Required video submissions are reasonable to expect – everyone is able to produce that
Lessons learned
● Give yourself permission to take risk

15. Breakout Room 15 - Philip Bouchard
Challenges:
● Lack of positive collisions
● No flyby mentoring
● Distractions, especially at the MBA level due to work commitments, parenting
● Use of technology due to the age group (30-40 years old)
● Technology challenges - hardware
● 3 hours classes challenge for attention → requires a redesign
Solutions:
● More mentor meetups
● Use mentors that were tried and true
● Discord is great for collaboration
● Setting the participation time for participating in group
● Virtual is doing better to Broader participation based on ability to be virtual
● Follow the physical schedule
● Better modeling for physical products
● Setting up the class ahead of time
● Allocation of time, huge time chunks were freed up
● Foster the interaction
● AVOID winging the class on the first day of going virtual
● Do organize Zoom chats later in the morning
● Scalable Solutions: Trained 20 consultants in Lean Innovation from the community- pro bono effort – Return
Stronger, structuring business models for small businesses, University/Chamber partnership

16. Breakout Room 16 - Radhika Malpani
Learning from COVID Times →
Poster Presentations: Tools for online engagement: sido.com
Biggest challenge:
● Student engagement and motivation, keeping energy high in long sessions, sense of esprit de
corps in class.
Things folks tried:
● Breakout rooms (broke monotony, paired teams in rooms - learnt from each other, more spirit of
camaraderie), guest speakers, shorter presentations (forced teams to focus on essence).
● Requiring Feedback - seen as critical to keeping engagement high, several points on focus on
quality of feedback over just quantity.
● Switching from synchronous mode to async - record presentations and feedback (Loom is a good
tool).
● Critical to do workshops on interviewing over Zoom.
Customer Discovery:
● Advantage: access to SME all over the world, could find the best sponsor for a given project
● Search channels like Reddit where beneficiaries might hangout. Sending lots of cold emails
works (at least in COVID times)

17. Breakout Room 17 - Sid Saleh
Poster: User centric training + conducting discovery interviews
Challenge: Losing faith in the future – waiting for normal.
However, have still found ways to engage.
More practice with virtual / mixed instruction … some students lean in, some check
out
Requiring camera on.
We’re in the middle of transition - still trying to figure it out
Lack of serendipity when you bring people together
Being proactive but resource constrained – this is what we ask our students to do

18. Breakout Room 20 - Todd Warren
Challenges:
● Burnout
● Start with shorter presentation
● Time Zones
Virtual Final Presentations
● Virtual Tradeshows
● Implement Videos in advance
● Smaller group and mentors
Moving away from relentlessly direct to other coaching model
● Pair wise coaching between individuals and teams
● Team coaching - worked on the team level
Multiple Instruction Model; and engaging students:
● Start with cameras to keep people engaged
● Preparing breakout rooms in advance
● Using seperate Zoom meetings
● Having someone focused on chat and logistics
Team Engagement
● Assigning team members to engage other, less engaged team members
● Pairwise
● Q’s in advance on asyc material; and then call on them to answer
● Follow-up; and individual coaching team
Assessment
● Peer review based on scenarios
● Dealing with individual issues
Interviews
● Can be a lot but need to work on quantifying it

19. Breakout Room 22 - Victoria Larke
Be Prepared for the Intensity of the preparation required as compared to pre-COVID times:
● Easily 10x
● Requires a total shift in mindset of instructors
● Prepare for how to initiate and manage engagement (engage in non-conversational ways to not disrupt the
flow i.e. use Y/N response in the chat function, visual show of hands or hold up coloured cards for
responses etc.)
Be prepared for the Intensity of the online class experience for instructors – both in class and outside of
class:
● Must ‘perform’ differently online and the participation of others changes too (guest speakers become like
your students; and using white-boarding to engage the team.
● Use any tools available to automate administration, no matter how seemingly small (Office hours are greatly
increased so use Calendly for scheduling etc.)
● Experiment with drop in office hours (either individual or teams)
● Make full use of the university’s production staff
● Get and utilize support for the class itself (TAs, admin support)
● Use more but shorter video modules and consider releasing ahead of the class, and then discuss during
class or office hours
Privacy in a variety of contexts was raised – with regard to technology (recordings by users etc.) and also how to
provide forums for students to ask questions in an anonymous way or create forums that do not include the
instructor etc.