Monthly Roundup: Lean Startup Stories You May Have Missed
Summer is heating up — and so are we! We’ve been publishing, reading, and tweeting up a storm about all the great stories in the Lean Startup community. We don’t want you to miss out on flexing your entrepreneurial muscles while you’re away at the beach, so at the start of each month, we’ll be packaging our favorite articles for you to read.
But first, check out our newly launched sponsors and community partner pages, which feature discounts from partners like TechCrunch Disrupt. We’ll be adding more deals and perks from partners in the months to come. (Interested in sponsoring? Email [email protected])
For some new reading material, bookmark the following 7 articles:
1 – Five Tips for Quickly Testing Your Idea
Source: Intuit Labs
When it comes to running experiments, you have a lot of options for techniques to try— sometimes too many to know where you should start. Intuit Labs decided to tackle this ‘analysis paralysis’ challenge by interviewing three speakers from the Lean Startup community: Yammer’s head of user experience Cindy Alvarez, Solve for Interesting founder Alistair Croll, and Adknowledge’s VP of marketing Anita Newton. Learn how these three leaders tackle their biggest experimentation challenges.
2 – Lean Innovation Management
Source: Steve Blank
It’s hard for established companies to innovate. When your primary responsibility is to your shareholders, it can be challenging to justify a new investment or pivot in direction. Long-term, however, innovation is critical to keeping your business alive and outpacing your competition (before a competitor sweeps in). What you need is a model that supports innovation without distracting teams from their core operations. Steve Blank’s framework for Lean Innovation Management provides great insight to help you get started.
3 – What a 123 Year Old Company Can Teach Us About Innovation
Source: Lean Startup Co.
It’s commonly known that most ventures fail within their first three years of operation. So when we look at a company like GE that has been around for more than 123 years, we can’t help but wonder what’s happening behind the scenes. Read this blog post for a recap of Lean Startup Company’s recent webinar with Mark Little, GE’s director of global research.
4 – Inside Obama’s Stealth Startup
Source: FastCompany
Learn how the Obama Administration silently recruited top talent from companies like Google and Facebook to reboot the government. This in-progress story will be fun to watch over the coming years, as it continues to unfold.
5 – Innovation Tips from the First U.S. CTO
Source: Lean Startup Co.
In April 2009, the Obama Administration appointed Aneesh Chopra, Virginia’s then Secretary of Technology, to be the first CTO of the United States. Soon after, Chopra found himself immersed in a billion dollar immigration project, a program to help Veterans retrieve healthcare records faster, and an initiative to help accelerate approval processes within the gold standard of bureaucratic organizations—the FDA. Learn how Chopra’s team outsmarted these constraints to get things done.
6 – How to Implement Hypothesis Driven Development
Source: ThoughtWorks
Barry O’Reilly, principal at ThoughtWorks, co-author of Lean Enterprise, walks us through the nuts and bolts of forming focused hypotheses and using the scientific method to drive software development. Read this story to rethink how you’re framing your business stories.
7 – How 5 Companies Created a Culture of Innovation
Source: The Next Web
Some businesses make innovation look easy. While most of us are struggling to find the right idea, certain brands seem to have everything together—steady streams of new products, never-before-seen branding concepts, and serious creative magic. Read this blog post to see the science behind these processes.
Interested in continuing the discussion from what you’ve just read? You’ll make a great addition to the 2015 Lean Startup Conference community. Join us on November 16-19 at Fort Mason. Come away with new Lean Startup contacts and actionable takeaways that you can immediately apply at your company. Click here for all the details and to register now.
This post was written by Ritika Puri, resident storyteller at The Lean Startup Conference.