Lean Startup

Diane Perlman, entrepreneur and former Global CMO of startup accelerator Mass Challenge, interviews Anne Boden, CEO of mobile-only challenger bank Starling Bank. They’ll discuss Starling’s approach to innovation and experimentation in a highly regulated industry, the biggest challenges for fintech in 2017, and how to best disrupt the holds big banks have on customers.

Firmhouse has been one of the active founders of the Dutch Lean Startup movement. They’ve helped the majority of Dutch startup accelerators with education, mostly focused on experimentation. After startup acceleration programs were brought into the corporate paradigm, Firmhouse began helping enterprise organizations execute the same practices in vastly different contexts and under vastly different constraints. In this fireside chat, Janne Zengerink (ING) and Bob Jansen (Firmhouse) will discuss how experimentation changes from the startup to the corporate environment.

In 2013, the UK arm of global drinks business Pernod Ricard embarked on a 1,000 day business transformation journey called “Project Ingenuity.” Driven by Lean Startup approaches, the strategy resulted in growth in both profit and market share, 95% employee engagement scores, and record low staff turnover rates. This year Pernod Ricard UK also entered The Times top 100 places to work rankings. In this fireside chat, Pernod Ricard’s Head of Employee Development, Bridget Gardner, will share the process, as well as the cultural and leadership lessons learned along the journey. Bridget will be in conversation with innovation adviser Elvin Turner from ETA.

This talk will cover how innovators can track and measure success using the right tools and metrics. It will explore how teams in the trenches can track the success of their business models via the experiments they will be running, as well as how innovation accounting can be done at the management and strategy levels. Learn how leaders at management level can make ongoing investment decisions of whether to double-down or divest from specific innovation projects. At the strategy level, learn how company leaders can measure the impact of innovation on their company as whole. Practical tips and guides, as well as examples from several companies, will be provided.

Organizations don’t innovate, people do. Modern leaders make the necessary business changes to remain competitive by using small, constant cycles of experimentation and iteration as opposed to moving the entire beast in one go. Francine Stevens will share lessons from the enterprise and startup worlds on how to think big but start small to foster an innovative culture that’s sustainable for the long term.

Despite the stereotype of the not-for-profit and government sectors being slow moving and mired in bureaucracy, innovation leaders at top UK research and aid agencies are taking pages from the private sector and running experiments that directly impact lives. The Department for International Development (DFID) and Cancer Research UK are two examples of organizations taking on Lean Impact tactics of testing and applying new technologies to development and fundraising issues. In this fireside chat with TriKro innovation coach Nick Noreña, members of DFID and Cancer Research UK share the strategies for and struggles around implementing Lean Startup in the Lean Impact sphere.

Cleantech startup POD Point has become one of Europe’s leading providers of electric vehicle supply equipment, offering a range of intelligent charging points. The firm has shipped over 30,000 points and boasts a publicly accessible network of over 2,500 charging bays. CEO/founder Erik Fairbairn will share how he’s used Lean Startup practices across the company to become one of the UK’s 100 fastest growing tech companies for the past two years running.

Finnish telecommunications company Elisa has been on a transformational journey—particularly since 2006, and in regards to its digital business transformation, where the focus has been driven by customer insight instead of technological prowess. The first step was developing a program for broadly discovering customer frustrations and business opportunities therein. This evolved into a separate department for new services and markets, generating several new digital businesses. Even though agile methods took firm hold in the technology development, the business mindset was still more about trying to scale fast than fail fast. Telecom companies need to ensure technical quality and make big investments in mature business areas, which is often the opposite of rapid experimentation. At the moment, Elisa has pivoted development of its new international businesses into strategic domains, which rigorously follow the Lean Startup principles. This means dedicated startup teams and using innovation accounting to guide

Large organizations are often like containerships—big, reliable, and efficient, but they can’t turn quickly. They often see startups as fast speedboats—responsive and nimble operations. Janet Bumpas is the Managing Director for one of StartupBootcamp/Innoleaps' corporate accelerator programs. She works with corporate teams to transform them from containerships into speedboats. They learn to move fast, using Lean Startup principles to validate customer needs and risky assumptions with market-based data. In her talk, she’ll outline strategies for enterprise organizations to spark and sustain nimble innovation, including how to avoid the most common causes of stalling out in the process.

Both Product Design Sprints and Lean techniques allow teams to move toward and iterate upon ideas quickly, helping companies build better products faster. Although the two processes are complementary, Product Design Sprints run at a different pace than the Lean process and offer different value to teams. In this talk, thoughtbot’s Development Director Laurie Young explores the Product Design Sprint, Design Thinking, and how to help teams transition from the learning in their early experiments to a strong product/market fit.

GE's adaptation of the Lean Startup program, called FastWorks, has been well documented thus far. But what are the specifics of the ongoing journey of the FastWorks mindset and methodology, as it makes its way through the organization in an effort to drive innovation and shift GE’s culture? How is GE building and scaling FastWorks across the company? How has GE measured its success to-date, and what does the future of FastWorks look like? In a conversation with Lean Startup Co. co-founder Heather McGough, GE’s FastWorks Skills Director, Sinéad Clarkin, will discuss GE’s learning journey with FastWorks. Sinéad will take us through the pain points, skill requirements, and roadmap for this landmark program.

Starting a new business is hard enough, but creating a new technology has unique challenges. From how to deploy early funding, to hiring from a community that you trust, Laurence Kemball-Cook, founder and CEO of Pavegen, gives his insights into how applying Lean Startup principles helped his company become the global leader in harvesting energy and data from footfall.

The NYC Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications is undergoing a major shift, using new technologies and unconventional approaches to better serve City partners and the millions of New Yorkers who depend on them. This presentation will shed light on the ways that an enormous government organization is working to become more agile, responsive, and contemporary to better get the job done. Following the presentation, NY1’s Josh Robin will conduct an on-stage interview with Dominic to learn more about these challenges and successes.

The NYC Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications is undergoing a major shift, using new technologies and unconventional approaches to better serve City partners and the millions of New Yorkers who depend on them. This presentation will shed light on the ways that an enormous government organization is working to become more agile, responsive, and contemporary to better get the job done. Following the presentation, NY1’s Josh Robin will conduct an on-stage interview with Dominic to learn more about these challenges and successes.

UNICEF's Venture Fund is the first financial vehicle of its kind in the United Nations—allowing for $50-100K investments in open source technology companies in the countries where UNICEF works. Chris Fabian will discuss the importance of new approaches to solving the world's most pressing problems, and how creating prototypes and provocations to industry has helped situate UNICEF as a leader in identifying, financing, and scaling solutions that have never before been realized. More on the award-winning UNICEF Office of Innovation here: www.unicefstories.org and www.unicefinnovationfund.org.

Founded in 2005, Etsy has grown into a public company with over 1,000 employees. It's no longer a startup (in the traditional definition), but in many ways, Etsy still thinks and builds like one. This presentation will walk through examples of how Etsy takes Lean Startup approaches to smaller, startup-like products within the company, including how these smaller teams are formed, how their work is tested, and how they exist within the larger company ecosystem to allow for constant iteration and innovation by the brand. Included here will be tips for supporting internal startups within established companies.

How many startups does it take to launch a unicorn? 100? 1,000? How many internal startup teams do you need to replace your growth engine? Breakthrough innovation is the result of collaboration among a diverse group of people, all working in a different way. Organizations can’t just leave it up to a couple of hand-chosen innovation teams. In this talk, Brant Cooper will take you through a framework you can use to make entrepreneurial action the norm throughout your organization. It’s a bold initiative to launch 100 startups in 100 days. Brant will go through each of the impact levers to show you how you can roll out a similar initiative within your own organization, one that lays the groundwork for innovation transformation (even if you don’t actually get to 100 in 100 days!)

When, where, and how does Lean innovation work best in not-very-lean Fortune 1000 companies? Why is Lean Startup so powerful in some situations, and a waste of time and resources in many others? Bob Dorf will explore the challenges Lean innovators face in oft-stodgy, bloated big corporations that can’t and won’t take the do-or-die risks so common among Lean startups. He’ll discuss the “lean 4x4:” four key challenges when putting Lean to work in a large-scale enterprise, and four pillars of Lean innovation success.

Nordstrom is in the process of modernizing its digital properties—web/mobile web/in-store digital/app—as well as redefining the design and processes across the UX organization. When Jyoti Shukla began supporting the UX team, she noticed a number of large scale, heavy processes in place that did not necessarily yield a direct return on investment, nor did they delight and excite the customer. Jyoti focused on leading the team to develop a lean approach in delivering software to exceed the expectations of Nordstrom customers. Although there are always big challenges with process change, there is a lot of excitement to move the needle using newer/leaner methods. Jyoti will discuss some of the peaks and valleys of the experience she has had at Nordstrom in using lean concepts to drive the UX organization.

The Innovation Stack: Five OD Practices to Unleash the Creative Potential of Lean Enterprise Teams Eventually, every successful business struggles to produce their next killer product or service. A strong business model might work miracles for decades, but it too will stumble in the face of perpetual shifts in technology and culture. Innovation paralysis in enterprise is no mystery – rather, it’s the direct consequence of how we’ve designed large organizations and their teams. During this talk, Mark Raheja will share classic (and, at times funny) examples of the five most common inhibitors to Lean Enterprise innovation, and introduce The Innovation Stack – a holistic set of five practices designed to jumpstart the innovative capacity of any team implementing Lean Startup.