The Lean Entrepreneurship Playbook A Practical Guide to Innovation in the Modern Enterprise

Established organizations in the public and private sectors struggle when bringing new, innovative ideas to life. This has resulted in the creation of countless “innovation programs” and initiatives, with many, perhaps most, failing to deliver meaningful results. Many of these initiatives fail because they do not get the momentum they need early on, they start in the wrong place, or they focus on the wrong problems; and creating the wrong type of initiative can doom it before it launches.

This book takes you through a step-by-step approach which will help you select, structure, and create the right type of initiative to nurture new and innovative ideas and ensure they have the best possible chance to succeed. It includes updated insights, and is filled with questions, examples, artifacts, and tools to help you make key choices as you develop a way to ensure new ideas in your organization flourish. It contains information, experience, and anecdotes that will help you identify, anticipate, and overcome not only roadblocks to bringing those ideas to life, but also obstacles to the initiative itself, and includes frameworks to help accelerate your deployment.

What You Will Learn

• How to build your initiative or program, step-by-step, and measure its effectiveness
• How innovative ideas differ, why that’s important, and why they require different approaches
• Common impediments to innovation and new idea incubation in public and private sector organizations and how to build an initiative that addresses them
• What to consider as you design and structure your approach to bringing new ideas to life whether they are products, programs, or internal projects
• How to lay a solid foundation for your initiative or program to ensure it meets your organization’s needs and stakeholder and influencer expectations
• The teams you will need and how to structure them
• How to continuously improve your program, framework, toolkit, or initiative to ensure it remains relevant delivers lasting value
• What you should know before you begin building your initiative
• The steps required to lay a solid foundation for the initiative before you begin building it
• How to create the conditions for repeatable innovation, acceleration, or new idea incubation

The book includes a toolkit which contains checklists, frameworks, tools, and ceremonies with step-by-step instructions to help accelerate your journey. It can be read from start to finish, or you can focus on the part, chapter, or even section that meets your immediate needs,

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Part One: Before you Begin.- Chapter 2: Why Innovation Fails in Established Organizations.- Chapter 3: Why Innovation Programs and Initiatives Fail.- Chapter 4: Lean Entrepreneurship and Why It Matters.- Part Two: Preparation.- Chapter 5: Assessing the Current State.- Chapter 6: Conducting Assessment Interviews.- Chapter 7: Designing Your Approach.- Chapter 8: Finalizing Objectives.- Chapter 9: Communicating.- Part Three: Build, Measure, Learn.- Chapter 10: Laying the Foundation.- Chapter 11: Launching the Initiative.- Chapter 12: Measuring Performance and Impact.- Chapter 13: Continuous Learning and Improvement.- Part Four: Conclusion.- Chapter 14: Conclusion.- Appendix 1: Toolkit: Initiative at a Glance One Page Overview Checklists.- Appendix 2: Toolkit: Ceremonies.- Appendix 3: Toolkit: Tools and Artifacts.

George is passionate about solving unsolved problems and applying technology in innovative ways to improve people’s lives. Over his more than thirty years in the technology industry George discovered innumerable obstacles to bringing new ideas to life in established organizations and, more importantly, how they could be overcome.

As VP of Strategy for a multibillion-dollar technology company – and faced with a challenge to design, deploy, operate, and evolve an innovative start-up accelerator program – George created what became the foundation of the Lean Entrepreneurship approach to enable others to overcome those obstacles.

Throughout his career, George delivered innovations of his own such as a knowledge base for a neural network-based predictive performance management solution, one of the earliest private clouds (2005), and a lightweight event management agent. George was also awarded a patent for securing protected content by identifying recording devices.

George has a broad range of experience including leading global scientific research, worldwide innovation initiatives, and an innovative start-up accelerator for a multi-billion-dollar technology company; holding many national and global leadership positions and leading global teams spanning North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia; serving as a Technology Evangelist, and; holding many technical roles such as Systems Programmer/Sysadmin and Systems Engineer.

George has shared his experience overcoming obstacles to innovation and new idea incubation in established organizations in two previous books: “The Innovative CIO”, and “Lean Entrepreneurship”.