In this podcast, I share a webinar that I setup with Michel Gelobter, author of “Lean Startups for Social Change“

The webinar is titled “Experimenting Our Way to Meaningful Change”

He discusses the Lean Startup approach, and how it can be used to quickly and efficiently improve social, environmental and community issues (homelessness, climate change, racism, government and nonprofit efficiency, and much more) without wasting time, resources and money.

You can watch a video the entire webinar with slides below

Links

* Lean Startups for Social Change: The Revolutionary Path to Big Impact* Contact information for Michel Gelobter* Email: [email protected]* Website: http://www.leanchange.net/blog/* Twitter: @lean_change * Portland State University Impact Entrepreneurs (Jacen Greene)* Lean Portland

Transcript

Brion (B): Welcome everybody. My name is Brion Hurley. I work with a group called Lean Portland and we are a volunteer group that works with local nonprofits to teach them Lean and Six Sigma principles and concepts. We’ve been working pretty aggressively, I guess, at that for the last couple of years now. I ran across Michel’s book a couple of years back and I thought that would be a good topic for us to share and talk about. I’d also like to introduce Jacen here, with PSU, who’s also helped us get this organized.

Jacen (J): Hi everyone. I’m Jacen Greene, Director of Impact Entrepreneurs in PSU’s School of Business. We’re a set of social innovation and social entrepreneurship programs and events for both students and community members. One of the programs I manage and teach in is our Certificate of Social Innovation. Undergraduate students, graduate students, and community members can take it to design and launch a new social venture – a nonprofit, a social enterprise, a government program. We’ve launched organizations such as the Dave’s Killer Bread Foundation, Next Garden, Construct Foundation, and a whole set of others. I teach Lean Startup methodology and this book is a great resource for our students and we’ll be using this webinar as a recording in our courses as well.

B: I’ll hand it over to Michel and you introduce yourself and then share some of your insights about your book, that would be great.

Michel (M): Thank you and thanks, everybody. Really glad to have a chance to speak with everybody. I am Michel Gelobter, I’m the author of Lean Startups for Social Change. I’ve been involved in social change work since a pretty young age and I have really come to realize, when I went into the for-profit world about the 15 years ago now to do cleantech software startups, I started realizing that I’d been doing startups in the social change world my whole life.