Lean Startup

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.

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.

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.

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 regular pivot or persevere meetings and funding decisions.

This keynote will share key learnings from Elisa's adoption of the Lean Startup methodology.

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.