The strategic imperative has been communicated and a team is formed but progress is slow to non-existent. What’s the matter? Everyone inside and outside the team agrees something must be done, so why is it starting to feel like the problem is too big for us? It seems like personal agendas are getting in the way. It’s not clear […]
Beyond Problem Solving to Value Creation: Teaching Innovation and Entrepreneurship in an Academic Environment
As an engineering educator at Rose-Hulman where our main focus is on undergraduate education, one of our priorities is to prepare our graduates to be immediate contributors in the workplace upon graduation and to be prepared for success over their careers as technical professionals. The placement rate for Rose-Hulman approaches 100 percent each year with […]
Taking Innovation Initiatives a Step Further
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. […]
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 […]