Lean Lunch with Karsten Newbury, Senior Vice President, Siemens

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• published: 12 Sep 2014
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Not unlike startup entrepreneurs, large enterprises seeking to innovate often obsess over technology. They feel as if innovation must involve invention. On the sustaining innovation end of continuum, this results in new features, or me-too products that don’t truly represent “innovation” at all. On the “breakthrough” side, the focus is typically on invention; in other words on creating new technology. Historically, this has resulted in the “labs in the wilderness”, where new stuff is actually invented, but never sees the light of day. There’s another way of thinking about this, however. In reality, “breakthrough innovation” is in the eye of the beholder. If you take a product successful in one market and deliver it to a new market (Steve Blank market type: segmented niche), it’s quite possible that said product is disruptive to the new market even if the technology has been around for years. So take an existing successful product, introduce it to a new market — and boom! — breakthrough innovation, new revenue stream, high-fives all around, right Well, not so fast. It’s a lot harder than it sounds! The tendency is to think that rolling out the new product is simply a matter of execution, in other words, doing the things you already know how to do well: repackage features, rebrand, shove it down the channel and voila! Actually however, it’s a matter of search. A new market requires you to look at what product capabilities are necessary to solve the specific problems the new market has? How does this market expect to be marketed to? How do they expect to buy? Are internal operations prepared to support the new market? Even if you’ve sold to this market in the past, in today’s rapid change environment, things have likely changed quite a bit. The organization needs to learn all over again. We spoke with Karsten Newbury, SVP of Siemens PLM, who leveraged Lean Startup principles to learn before executing. We encourage you to set aside an hour or so to listen in on the Karsten’s journey. Read the entire post here: http://www.movestheneedle.com/siemens-lean-startup-getting-internal-system-board-ftw/