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Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (LUASA) uses a holistic approach to foster entrepreneurial thinking and behavior of students and employees. Students and participants of the program shall be motivated to start own ventures during the study program or later in the life.

An entrepreneurial eco-system shall be built and a close partnership with regional key actors established.

A combination of Design Thinking and Lean Start-up is used for the entrepreneurial education. Fostering experimentation, early customer feedback, and interdisciplinary teamwork is essential. An enhanced Lean Canvas version is used for having a guideline to work on the important questions and documenting the learnings in the iterative process.

The program “Smart-up” of LUASA is running since three years as a pilot in two departments and is now rolled out to the entire University. Since program start more than 120 start-ups have been founded.

In all study programs, an “entrepreneurial track” is defined and students can earn credits while working on their own projects. Two interdisciplinary modules are offered. The proposed Smart-up Lean Canvas has been proven to be a key tool to develop innovative ideas in start-ups and in existing companies.

The combination of Design Thinking and Lean Start-up in a holistic setup proved that students can learn the methods and tools and are able to use them now or later as entre- or intrapreneurs.

Students are motivated to start their own business, meet role models and participating at different (networking) events.

The combination of Design Thinking and Lean Start-up with analytical approaches like Systems Thinking and Data Analytics supports the problem understanding and solution (product/service and business) design.

This paper aims to propose an integrated methodology for evaluating academic spin-offs (ASOs) for supporting both the development phase and performance evaluation. The ASOs have peculiar characteristics compared to other start-up companies and the debate on their evaluation is still open.

The proposed methodology, adopting a lean approach, faces the typical problems that characterize the growth of an ASO: the excessive attention to the technological aspects with respect to the commercial and managerial ones; and the need for evaluation systems that try to evaluate all risk areas and to highlight any misalignment. The methodology was built also starting from the results of an Erasmus + research project, co-funded by the European Commission, called spin-off lean acceleration.

The methodology proposes to monitor the main risk areas (market, technological, implementation, governance and financial). For each of these areas, at first, a framework and a checklist are proposed for supporting the qualitative assessment of the potential of each areas. In the second part, a set of metrics for monitoring the performances and to understand if the spinoff is developing in the right direction is proposed. Moreover, the methodology was applied to the spin-offs at the University of Calabria (Italy), and the paper reports the first results obtained.

A new canvas model (lean acceleration canvas), more specific and suited to the context of ASOs, was developed and tested. A lean approach has been adopted also for understanding the weakness of traditional methods. The proposed methodology could be used by the technology transfer offices in their institutional activity of supporting ASOs.

Customer value is the key to successful innovation management. This task is considered complex and abstract. For this reason, several models have been proposed to that end, among them, Lean approaches. Lean's background has been applied to value identification, providing many benefits. This paper aims at analyzing the practices employed to identify customer value through Lean approaches.

Through a systematic literature review, the main Lean practices for customer value identification were categorized based on five main streams: (1) customer development, (2) customer value, (3) lean product, (4) lean start-up, and (5) lean innovation. These practices were organized into a framework that addresses value identification based on ideation, value prospection, requirements, construction and measurement, and value delivery.

In total, 33 practices were found to support capturing the value from the customer's perception. Additionally, a discussion is provided on the complementarity and differences between practices.

A framework is proposed to integrate the five streams and the corresponding practices for value identification. The results provide mechanisms that can benefit practitioners to better understand the value demanded by customers during innovation management. In fact, practitioners can use the proposed framework to identify value to customers in a holistic way. Academically, the results gather research on customer value and innovation management to contribute with a novel artifact for customer value identification in operations management using Lean approaches. Finally, a future research agenda on value identification is proposed.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and describe the drivers of lean approaches and successful management of wearable technology start-ups. The paper is a descriptive study that employed a case study methodology based on semi-structured interviews with ten start-ups’ managers in Wearable Technology 2017 conference. Participants were selected based on convenience sampling and the pre-set criteria. The current study contributes to this field through the main findings, which suggest that four stages need to be considered by starts-up for a successful market readiness, including the time of entry and overcoming market entry barriers, product attributes, product development process, and commercialization. Finally, findings were categorized in the form of an iterative learning loop model and also, practical strategies and methods were recommended for successfully going through each stage.

Social entrepreneurship (SE) has become the engine propelling the rapid expansion of the social/environmental sector; thus, the authors need to examine it from different perspectives. First of all, it is vital to understand the concept of SE in an attempt to understand the most basic question: what makes an entrepreneurship social and what makes a social initiative a SE? Second, it is important to know the tools to develop a SE such as the business model canvas and design thinking, among others, which are adapted to SE, as well as tools that are unique to the sector such as impact measurement and impact investing. Third, aspiring SEs have to understand the current ecosystem in order to take advantage of the enormous support that the SE ecosystem has to offer thanks to global players such as Ashoka, the Schwab, and Skoll foundations as well as prominent Latin American players such as New Ventures Group, ANDE, and collective company-driven initiatives such as Momentum led by BBVA Bank that have supported more than 10,000 SE all over the world. Finally, the authors will introduce the case of low-income house builders Hábtiva and a student challenge to ignite aspiring social entrepreneurs. This chapter provides a glimpse of the field SE by focusing in its importance in our current challenging world, its definition, some tools used in the field, the current ecosystem of SE, how to measure social impact, and some cases and challenges.

This study aims to present a novel approach of using technology trends to trigger product ideas. It is primarily addressed to product ideation where limited applied approaches are available.

The model is built by extending the theoretical framework of ideation study. It comprises morphological analysis with product breakdown as primary and technological trends as a secondary dimension to prompt product ideas from user’s intuition. The approach is multidisciplinary using insights from the areas of cognition, management strategy and project management. The model is further tested in two different test configurations with university students (n = 81).

The results indicate that this systematic model can increase the quality and number of ideas generated by the students compared to generally practised approaches. It is shown that this approach increases the chances of triggering ideas.

The testing of the present model is comprehensive and in no means exhaustive.

Because of the shrinking product life cycle, organisations have a need for systematic product ideation models that can assist in innovating their product ranges. It is important to study idea generation for products to not only assist product innovation but also comprehensively understand the process of creativity. The proposed model is primarily addressed to product innovation projects where limited practical tools are available for product ideation. The present model is easy to apply and has the tendency to generate novel product ideas that can lead to successful product innovations.

Product innovation currently has limited systematic ideation tools where this study contributes.

Why do some individuals become entrepreneurs while others do not? This fundamental question has vexed entrepreneurship scholars for some time, giving rise to various schools of thought. Traditional economic motivation theories, for example, suggest that entrepreneurial opportunities arise from changes in either supply (Shane, 2000) or demand (Dew et al., 2004) and emphasize personal economic gain as a motivator for pursuing entrepreneurship. Both neoclassical equilibrium and psychological theories take a person-centric perspective whereby stable, enduring differences among people’s characteristics, determines who becomes an entrepreneur. Opportunity recognition may be enhanced through perspective taking (i.e. putting oneself in the shoes of another person) (Prandelli et al., 2016).

The founders of the company provided us with access to the inner workings of the company, their mentors and advisors and themselves. This study used archival research and interviews when preparing this case. Interviews allow for the development of uncensored, real-life insights into the entrepreneur’s business experience. The authors first conducted a 90-min interview with Rajia and Ray at DifferenceMaker^® Central on the UMass Lowell campus. DifferenceMaker^® provided us with pictures and timelines from when Rajia and Ray participated in the various DifferenceMaker^® activities and competitions. A follow-on 90-min interview was conducted with the founders four months later at the UMass Lowell Innovation Hub to delve deeper into their transition from engineers to entrepreneurs.

In the summer of 2016, the future of invisaWear suddenly became uncertain. Rajia Abdelaziz and Ray Hamilton had conceived an idea for smart jewelry that they felt solved a real problem. But it was one thing to have a great idea and quite another to turn that idea into a real business. As engineering students, they were accustomed to solving problems, but if they truly wanted to make an impact, they had to learn to solve problems as entrepreneurs. With the help of DifferenceMaker^® and their mentors, they developed an entrepreneurial mind-set and decided to build invisaWear into a company.

This case is suitable for an undergraduate course in business or entrepreneurship. This case is intended to illustrate to both business and non-business students how individuals with different backgrounds can become entrepreneurs. Presented as a real-life example of how engineering students can make the transition to an entrepreneurial mind-set, the case can also be used to hone in on select topics including opportunity recognition, problem-solving, ideation and the business model canvas.

As a response to global population growth and increasing demand for food, farmers have been complementing traditional agriculture practices with vertical farming (VF) and indoor hydroponic systems. To facilitate the growth of the VF industry, this paper aims to identify business model elements and their configurations that lead to high firm performance.

The research goals were met by conducting literature reviews coupled with a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) on five business model elements, “superior” OR “strong” performance as two possible outcomes, and the top-ranked global VF growers listed in the Crunchbase Database.

From the fsQCA results, it was observed that several business model configurations lead to strong firm performance. Vertical farms growing in urban settings and having strong customer engagement platforms, coupled with a presence of business-to-business (B2B) sales channels, are more consistently associated with superior performance. These results imply that the decision configuration of location, along with customer engagement activity and sales activity are differentiating factors between good firm performance and superior firm performance in the case of vertical farms.

This paper contributes to expanding the knowledge of business model theory, business model configurations and VF management, providing specific guidelines for vertical farm owners and investors related to decision-making for higher firm performance, as well as positive environmental, social and economic impact.