Tag Archives: Lean Startup

3 criteria your business ideas must have for them to work

Jorge in Innovation

This is part three of the series on how to leave small thinking behind. In the first post, I showed you a simple technique for coming up with radical ideas. On the second part, I showed you how to evaluate ideas so they don’t fit into “me-too” territory. Here, I’ll tell you how to determine which ideas might work.

A short recap from part 1 and part 2:

In part 1 of this series I elaborated a little bit on how to shift from “me-too” thinking to “radical thinking” by taking your existing strategy and stretching it to an extreme, and scaling them back a little bit. This technique yields ideas that are impractical, super expensive and dangerous. But you can scale them back a little bit to make them doable.

In part 2, I showed you how to further filter those initial ideas by using an evaluation criteria of creativity, business, and people impact.

Great, but after you’ve developed a list of radical ideas how do you decide which ones to pursue?…

For innovation: listen to your customers but don’t believe them

Jorge in Innovation

Big data and analytics are going to alter customer experiences through personalization. But, companies should be wise get out of the building and not assume that big data is an innovation silver bullet.

As companies adopt great business insights such as social and big data technologies, automation and anticipation will become hotly adopted strategies to create or enhance existing offerings. While people are stuck perpending over kibana vs grafana, many retailers are getting ahead in the competition simply because they’re focused on their development by implementing new strategies and using more advanced business software such as the ones developed by CBX. For some industries, such as retail, providing the option for customers to order through their mobile phone is the first step towards automation and anticipation, and pretty soon we’ll start seeing people’s orders waiting for them before they even order them.

With all the data about customer habits it has accumulated over the years, Starbucks is a company that is uniquely positioned to do this. I don’t know the exact number of times the average person stops by Starbucks on their way to work, but I’m sure it is in the 3 day average.

That’s an ingrained habit.

But, even with some sense of certainty of what people might do, we still have to ask ourselves some questions: How will customers benefit from us anticipating what they will order today? At what point does novelty wear off? How will it make them feel? What would make them feel less uncomfortable?…

5 reasons why ethnography is not going to become mainstream anytime soon

Jorge in Innovation

It seems that since design thinking and lean startup methodologies have a “talk to potential customers to validate” component, it may seem that ethnography is becoming mainstream.

It isn’t.

In my opinion, of all the innovation techniques available to an innovation practitioner, entrepreneur, marketer or business leader none is more important than getting out on the field and observing people in their domains. And, we have ways to go before this ever becomes mainstream.…

To innovate start with inspiration, not need

Jorge in Innovation, Leadership

In the world of innovation, we routinely talk about addressing needs as a starting point to frame our thinking. That is what the vast majority of innovation approaches, and practitioners, consultants; preach. There is a huge industry that is booming at the moment because of this, and a dominant model is slowly taking over both the startup and corporate world: Lean Startup.

We can sum up The Lean Startup like this: identify a need that isn’t being addressed, think of a solution, validate that solution with potential customers, iterate to get close to a solution as fast as possible.

While I don’t disagree with addressing people’s needs, I do believe that is a limited view over the long run. It is simple logic, how long does it take for a framework to become a best practice? And, how long until we have undifferentiated products and services?

For this reason, in my workshops, I like to get people to redesign/rethink things for themselves. As I take them through a process of thinking critically about what’s around them, I tell them to “look beyond the problem and see possibilities”, and then create something for themselves.

Why?…

Why should companies launch imperfect products?

Jorge in Innovation, Question-To-Innovate, Questions

Why should companies launch imperfect products?

Although we think there are exceptions to the rule (Apple, Square), no company ever launches a complete product.

The Lean Startup advocates that entrepreneurs can and should launch products and services that are not %100 percent complete. This idea, of constant experimentation, is not new. Most products that are launched by startups are an initial prototype that tests for market validation.

Big companies, by their nature, don’t do this. At least not all of them.

Starbucks, for example, is an outlier. If you’ve read about how Statbucks got started, then you won’t be surprised. As outlined on a Fast Company article, they’ve recently taken to experiment with new marketing channels, such as Groupon, and in doing so put their huge digital platform to the test:…

Stop guessing. Business is done outside the office!

Jorge in entrepreneurship, Innovation, Strategy

The Answers Are Outside The Building

How do you do real business development? “Stop guessing. Business is done outside the office!” That is the core message from Stu Heilsberg’s book. A true Business Development Executive, Stu shares his experience in The Answers Are Outside The Building.

Business development is customer/client development. Being Startup Weekend Organizer and entrepreneur, I’m well aware of the “customer development” concept advocated by Eric Ries and Steve Blank.…