Corporations have begun to adopt innovation methods and principles they observe in startups (having long forgotten their own entrepreneurial roots). For example, GE’s FastWorks program is modeled upon Eric Ries’s Lean Startup philosophy, aiming to radically transform the way the 122+ year old company introduces new products and services to market. GE deserves credit for its widespread approach to encouraging
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A ‘Minimum Viable Product’ or MVP is a business tool to reduce the inherent uncertainty with introducing new products in unknown market spaces. It is based on the age-old business practice that one must balance the level of investment with appropriate risk – that as one reduces business risk, one can gradually increase the level of investment. MVP’s reduce, not
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Enter The Dragon was a landmark movie in many ways – It was the first Hollywood-Asian Kung-Fu production, it was Bruce Lee’s last completed movie (he died weeks before the official release), and it featured a never before seen diverse cast of heroes including Bruce, John Saxon and Jim Kelly. After Enter The Dragon, everyone was Kung-Fu fighting. The movie
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The new management fad is here: Teaching large companies to adopt Lean Startup thinking (Yes, I’m guilty as charged myself). But this is already off to a bad start if it is simply a hammer hitting another nail. The Classic Lean The two previous instantiations of Lean Thinking were certainly the right tool for the job. First applied to manufacturing, ‘classic’
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Back in 1999, minty-fresh from my Sloan MBA and stint at the Boston Consulting Group, I thought I knew all there was to know about ‘survival’ business jargon. This namely consisted of what I called the ‘big eight’ buzzwords: The first four related to top-line growth, namely: Strategy, Competitive Advantage, M&A (when you have no competitive advantage but you have
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Seed accelerators or incubators like the Y-Combinator and TechStars have become increasingly popular mechanisms to support startups, offering funding, mentoring and sometimes office-space for founders and their teams. There are hundreds of such programs in the United States and abroad and the number seems to be growing by the day. However, as reported in the Wall Street Journal, a recent
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Who coined the word “Pivot”? “I want to introduce the concept of the pivot, the idea that successful startups change directions but stay grounded in what they’ve learned.” Eric Ries, of course.
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Lean Startups Trivia Who came up with the term Minimum Viable Product? Frank Robinson
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What the diagnostics business can teach us about innovation investment decisions. There are easy businesses and there are hard businesses. Then there are REALLY HARD businesses. If you ask me (and I’m living it now in my current startup, Biological Dynamics), the hardest business of all is medical diagnostics, especially for initial disease screening (is the patient healthy or
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In their book “The Startups Owner’s Manual” authors Steven Gary Blank and Bob Dorf argue that almost everything we know about taking products to market is wrong! How’s that for an opening statement!? They go on to illustrate how the world of new product introduction is littered with failures, mostly because companies (including startups) are using the wrong new business
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Necrophone 