Article

Lean Innovation with Encyclopedia, Nokia and Wheels

Joe Miller

Published on: May 10th, 2012

This post was previously on the Pathfinder Software site. Pathfinder Software changed its name to Orthogonal in 2016. Read more.

Orthogonal’s CEO Bernhard Kappe assembled a panel for last weeks AITP Spring Technology Conference focusing on how large enterprises are employing lean startup principles to improve innovation outcomes.

The panelists included:

Jorgen Hesselberg, Senior Manager, Agile Enterprise Adoption, Nokia
Greg Healy, Chief Product Officer, Encyclopedia Britannica
Brian Chau, Director of Product Innovation, Wheels, Inc.

Current innovation best practices focus heavily on different ways of generating ideas for new products. Yet for most companies, this is not where the problem lies. The problem lies in determining which of those ideas can be successfully scaled into profitable new lines of business. Most companies place big bets on the wrong ideas for the wrong reasons. As a result, 9 out of 10 new products fail.

The Lean Startup approach to innovation provides a more efficient way to determine which ideas merit further development and to rapidly bring the right ones to product/market fit. Business model analysis, rapid cycles of hypothesis testing using minimal experiments and feedback from real customers can help you decide when to pivot, when to persevere, and when to allocate your innovation budget to other ideas.

By combining lean startup principles with appropriate staffing of innovation departments and a portfolio strategy based on innovation accounting, enterprises can generate more successful products faster with fewer costly misses.

Watch the video for real world examples of how to implement lean practices at an established corporation.