Any long-lasting business has to develop new ideas and innovate.
I emphasise ‘ideas’ rather than ‘products’ or ‘services’ because it is the idea that is the fundamental building block. Any long-lasting busines therefore needs to have an entrepreneurial mentality that generates ideas and runs with them until they get turned into reality somewhere in its management brain.
To read more about this, you should have a look at Gary Hamel’s excellent book The Future of Management, which shows how you can benefit by having an innovative approach to management.
My interest in new ideas was piqued again today by a new article from Harvard, Teaching a ‘Lean Startup’ Strategy by Carmen Nobel.
Carmen reports on research which finds that, “many startups fail because they waste too much time and money building the wrong product before realizing too late what the right product should have been.” Instead they advocate the use of the ‘lean startup’ where “a company launches as quickly as possible with a ‘minimum viable product’ (MVP), a bare-bones product that includes just enough features to allow useful feedback from early adopters.” In this way, the customer becomes part of the design process and, as we know with any change - which is what a new product is - if you involve the people who will be affected in the management of the change process, then change will be smoother and less costly.
‘Lean startup’ doesn’t just apply to startups, but to all long-lasting businesses which are developing new ideas.
These are just two of the BIG questions we at bquest ask our clients who want to be pro-active in shaping their future.
Firstly: How do you mix ‘cash-cow’ production of currently successful products or services, which is all about maximising efficiencies, with the constant need also to think entrepreneurially? How does your management mix these two mentalities? Have you got the right key people?
Secondly: How do you get your new ideas to the market place in an MVP way so you can get your customers actively involved in their development?
We then help you answer them.
David at bquest
