One sunny afternoon in July 1977, David Bowie was gazing out of his window at Hansa Studios in West Berlin. Across the road he noticed a young couple kissing by the city’s infamous wall. He knew the people in question (and he knew that they shouldn’t be doing what they were doing). But out of […]
The success of the marketing programme in a startup is inexorably linked to the way the business is developing the product. Too complicated a feature-set or too broad a target market for instance, and the marketing effort can be compromised before it’s even out of the blocks. Which is why it’s imperative that marketing expertise […]
What’s intriguing about commercially successful innovation is what actually succeeds. The most disruptive initiatives of our age are very rarely technology breakthroughs! WhatsApp didn’t become the western world’s default messaging platform or Dropbox the consumer cloud storage standard through more advanced technology. They did it, quite simply, by developing a more intuitive user experience. The […]
I’ve been banging on about The Lean Startup ever since Eric Ries wrote it in 2011. The problem I had in the early days though, was that you can’t retro-fit the thinking. If a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) wasn’t part of the initial development plan, then you weren’t just re-structuring, you were also re-setting expectations. […]
Arrigo Sacchi was a bonafide disruptor. He started a management revolution because he understood what you really need for innovation to flourish. There should be a chapter about him in every business book as a result.
Innovation & transformation, Marketing Management
There are no blueprints for a technology startup. It’s not like expanding a product line or opening a branch office. These companies are trying to create a market with no service history, little brand equity and by selling something that nobody has bought before. The kind of customer who buys a product like this, from an […]
This article originally appeared in Entrepreneur If you believe that lean startup methods lead to cheap products and companies, or that lean startup companies don’t think big, think again. The digital revolution, globalization and technology platforms have forced companies to bring products to market faster than ever to stay alive, and even behemoths such as […]
I’ve been banging on about The Lean Startup ever since Eric Ries wrote it in 2011. The problem I had in the early days was that you can’t retro-fit the thinking. If a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) wasn’t part of the initial development plan, then you weren’t just re-structuring you were also re-setting expectations. Which, in […]
The big difference with working a start-up is that there are no blueprints. Nobody has done this before. Nobody has sold what you’re about to sell. Very few people will have written a marketing plan for a business that has no brand presence or a product that doesn’t exist yet. Fewer still will have seen that […]
