When was the last time your company developed a new product or service? Are you squeezing products designed years ago into your organization? Don’t you know how to develop new billing lines, find new clients or develop a new business model?
If you are an executive of a company, work in a multinational or own your own company, more than once you will have asked yourself some or all of the above questions.
The large multinationals, in general, behave like large oil tankers… they have a great engine to move forward, but changing course is very difficult for them. In this post I would like to explain some tools and keys for a medium or large company to innovate as the newest Startups do.
The Lean Startup methodology helps you achieve it. I’m going to break down the steps to make the change in your organization.
Build The Innovative Team
It is essential that the company’s management be motivated and push for change to occur. This push must be reflected in facilitating the formation and operation of the team that is going to lead the change.
The team is interested in being made up of people from different departments, with different points of view and training. As in a startup, it is interesting that the profiles are complementary because the result is much better than the simple sum of the team members.
Helping The Innovative Team Think Agile
It is important to know the fundamentals of the Lean startup. How they can help you and that the whole team starts from a knowledge base and knows the reason for the work they are going to do. Some training pills at this point are the most productive for the work to be done.
Inspiration From Other Sectors
Innovating often implies bringing technologies, business models or trends from other sectors to our sector that can provide a new way of doing things. We should not think that everything has already been invented, because even if that were the case, we can certainly apply advances to our sector that are taking place in other fields. It is important for the innovative team to carry out research work in this regard, for two reasons: to open their minds and find solutions in other sectors to their own problems.
Develop New Business Models And New Billing Lines
Giving a twist to the current business model is the basis for developing new lines of business. What is currently being done, what has been tried to do, reasons for success and failure of each initiative carried out in the past, together with the inspiration of the previous point, are the starting point for proposing new strategies.
Proposing a new business model implies knowledge of the sector (entrepreneurial team), techniques to develop new business models and a lot of creativity To capture the new business model, tools such as the value proposition canvas and Early Adopter Business Model Canvas are used .
Testing And Prototyping Of The New Business Model
Once the new business model, the new billing line and the new clients that we are going to reach have been proposed, it is time to check if all the hypotheses raised in the business model are true or not. To do this, we develop experiments , prototypes or whatever is necessary to test these business hypotheses. In a large company this process is critical for two reasons:
- It seems that the target customer is known, because it is the same as always.
- It is difficult to validate the hypotheses raised.
This process must be as fast as possible, speed and efficiency is the difference between success or failure.