How Corporations Can Innovate Like Startups?

Today, software startups have become one of the key drivers of economy and innovation. In 2016, 550,000 new startups have been established each month in the US only. Even though they are inexperienced, young and immature, their products are disrupting traditional markets and are putting well-established actors under pressure. Uber, Spotify, and Airbnb, to name just a few, are examples of software startups that have grown rapidly. Startups offer new product, new business model, and new business value at high speed, and with cutting edge technology. They continuously talk to their potential customers to discover gaps in the existing offers, iterate, and conduct experiments to find repeatable and scalable business models. They are willing to pivot immediately if the opportunity does not prove viable.The awareness and use of the Lean startup method has grown rapidly amongst the software startup community in recent years. Similar to many precedent methods, the development and promotion of Lean startup have been almost entirely driven by practitioners and consultants, with little participation from the research community during the early stage of its evolution. However now it becomes the focus of more and more research efforts.In this study, we examine two large organisations who run internal startup for developing new products and identify the enablers and inhibitors for Lean internal startups. The findings suggest that an internal startup can be initiated top-down by management, or bottom-up by employees, which faces different challenges. A list of enablers and inhibitors of applying Lean startup in large companies are identified, including top management support and cross-functional team as key enablers. Both cases face different inhibitors due to the different process of inception, objective of the initiative and type of the product developed.

This seminar is one of a series of seminars in the Whitaker Ideas Forum seminar series.  Henry will be representing the Agile and Open Innovation (Lero) research cluster.