Today’s post touches on one of the more popular startup education approaches, Lean LaunchPad, which has proven effective in a wide range of contexts across the country (i.e., universities, large and small business development settings, the NSF I-Corps program), and for good reason. Lean LaunchPad presents a systematic process for customer discovery and product-market fit. […]
Archives for May 2016
People are Innovative, Organizations are Not
New ventures are completely focused on innovation by developing new products and solutions that create value for a growing customer base. As the successful venture grows, its priority often shifts to excellence in execution with a focus on sales, margins and growth. It becomes very good at doing what it has always done and not […]
Don’t Just Fail Fast — Learn Fast! Fail with a Purpose!
Your projects are running into problems late in the development process. They are fully staffed and some of them even look to be moving on pace through the use of daily stand-up meetings, visual management and obeya rooms and then – BAM! – a problem arises which requires significant back-tracking in the design, a resetting […]
Commitment Starts with Understanding What You Are Signing up For
In talking about the last “C” of Clarity, Confidence and Commitment, I want to focus on the importance of trust and the power of knowledge over ignorance. As was pointed out in Scott Atkin’s last blog post, when attempting to encourage necessary innovation within an organization, it is not sufficient to simply say “Act entrepreneurially, let’s […]
Realizing Innovation: It Takes a Village!
When executive management looks to improve a company’s innovation capability, their gaze typically settles on the group of technical folks; engineers, scientists and/or programmers collectively called something like R&D, Development or Engineering. I suppose this is a reasonable place to start, but true improvement needs to extend beyond the technical team as can be seen […]