Lean Startup

Creating space for innovation to thrive in an existing business is challenging but possible with communication and patience, not unlike raising children. Learn how BabyCenter’s Beth Sordi has led her team to seek out, test, and validate new business models using testing dashboards, two-factor tests, and well-constructed consumer interactions without disturbing her company’s core business.

Infusing Lean Startup into a large organization is hard. This lightning talk with Travelport Labs’ design manager Nicole Shephard highlights the screw-ups, successes, and insights gleaned from years spent testing and refining a Lean Startup-centered innovation program at the $2B travel technology company.

By running a Lean hackathon for underprivileged communities in Guam and DC, Lean Mobile Apps was able to maximize visibility for their idea. By tapping into their team resources to implement no-nonsense strategies with measurable results, they brought in relevant users—who then provided solid data that appealed to would-be investors and sponsors.

Learn how Macy’s, a 150-year-old retail giant, went from testing one Lean team to funding 22 Lean teams in two years. The retailer’s journey is one of eating its own dog food – continuously testing, learning, and using build-measure-learn cycles, customer feedback, and business results to make believers out of even the most skeptical stakeholders and partners. Cindy Peterson and Janel Wellborn will share their top ten learnings that you can apply to scaling Lean in a large enterprise.

The team behind a new product is the most important ingredient to its success. But how do you pick the right team? What do you look for? And if you are in a large enterprise looking to field multiple innovation teams, how do you maximize your chances for success? This talk looks at the lessons Janet Bumpas learned running selection processes for internal innovation efforts at large enterprise companies.

After the economic collapse of 2008 and a devastating writers strike, selling an original screenplay in Hollywood became a more difficult proposition than ever before. Dikran Ornekian and his partner Rylend Grant will talk about how this harsh environment pushed them into trying something different — testing their script ideas as short stories — and how this new approach opened more doors for them than any screenplay ever had.

Charu Manchanda Nair explains how her company pushed the frontier of personal diversity mapping using Lean Startup principles. #ignite

Magoosh, a company that creates web and mobile apps to help students prepare for standardized tests, embedded Lean Startup principles into its core values to great success. CEO Bhavin Parikh will provide a concrete example of how those values helped an individual on his team use Lean Startup to invalidate a feature hypothesis.

Hear how business leaders from multi-billion dollar organizations are getting outside their comfort zone to take part in a transformational experience and embrace Lean Startup practices and principles that leave a lasting impact on individuals and their organizations.

You have a vision for how your venture is going to change the world. But how do you align that big picture with the practical elements of running a business? Lynn Johnson will speak about the importance of creating a “Culture Code” as a framework for integrating your vision and values into every aspect of your day-to-day business operations.

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.