Innovation Leadership

Lean Startup was born from a need for companies to innovate in high-risk environments in constantly changing markets. Like its predecessor, Agile Software Development, Lean Startup methodology aims at applying a scientific approach to innovation, identifying business assumptions, and then validating and invalidating business model hypotheses.

Demographics used to be a marketer’s only tool, but it's insufficient for early-stage customer discovery, and almost useless for designing user experience. Now we use customer personas to generate an intense focus on early adopters and empathy with end users. In this session, we learn how to identify early customers through segmentation and customer personas.

Qualitative data and quantitative data do not exist in opposition. Qualitative data from UXers should not compete with the quantitative data product owners need for their business model. Both are necessary to a complete understanding of where the desirability of the product meets the viability of the business. Storyboarding is a simple way to start integrating both perspectives into a complete picture of how the user experience impacts the business model.

Support your customer discovery, landing page, and comprehension test processes with a basic grasp of applicable statistics. You will learn how to recognize false signals in your experiments, determine sample sizes for experiments, calculate margins of error in your results, and understand the impact of population, sample size, and confidence interval. Ultimately you will be able to identify the winning experiment given a variety of test results.

Become a better leader by identifying habits that work and don’t work in startup environments. This module helps you identify your own bad leadership habits and design better habits that work for your team. You will create a plan for collecting feedback on your behaviors, break down good and bad leadership habits in a matrix exercise, and create OKRs for continuous self-improvement

Goal-setting is an important step before any major journey. Defining effective goals allows you and your team to make progress and then measure it. This module covers program goal-setting, and how to use these techniques to create a dashboard to keep your innovation project on track.

Define a vision for the future, a path to get there, and effective watchtowers to see when disruption is coming. This module puts your company on the path towards self-disruption, helping you stay on the leading edge of your market and allowing you to get out in front of your competitors -- and stay there.

Innovation Ecosystems are complex, and they challenge some of the traditional models of R&D and innovation. A holistic view of how culture, people, and processes interact is vital to allow a system to disrupt and reinvent itself. This workshop focuses on how to map out your ecosystem and identify obstacles that are putting the brakes on innovation.

Why don't stage gates work? Why doesn't spending more money on R&D lead to more innovation? How can I drag my company into the future? This module dives into how to understand the ROI of innovation, explain it to stakeholders, and make a case for a dedicated innovation budget using metered funding.

This module shows you how startups use business models to drive innovation, including how uses of a business model differ between startups seeking product/market fit and larger corporations that have already found it. Learn how to fill out a business model canvas, how to identify risk in your business, and how to prioritize your tasks based on our business assumptions.

Every entrepreneur needs to understand how to create a basic financial model of their business. This module teaches you the most important elements to model for the most common business types, and to project how your business will grow based on the relationship between specific customer and product metrics and engines of growth.