“When you have only one test, you don’t have entrepreneurs; you have politicians. When you have lots of ideas you have entrepreneurs.”
Scott Cook, Founder, Intuit Inc.
This month’s Forbe’s Magazine includes an amazing article by Bruce Ubin, highlighting Intuit’s innovation efforts. The article includes coverage of our totally kick-ass lean startup workshop, and one of the teams experiencing the event. I’m incredibly proud of all the folks working hard to make Intuit such an innovative company, and especially the teams mentioned in the article – nice work guys!
Imagine you were just hired at one of Silicon Valley’s more innovative companies, Intuit, and you’re determined to make a big impression during your first few weeks on the job. As part of your new-hire orientation week, your team is challenged to create a bold new idea for the company in only 48 hours. You and are your team come up with an awesome concept, or so you think, and you begin to feel excited that you just might have discovered the next big thing. Then boom! You discover real customers aren’t as excited about your ideas a you are. It simply won’t work in the real world. You now have less than 24 hours to “pivot” to a new direction, to discover an alternate plan to success. No pressure.
If you’re ever wondered how soon you should introduce newly hires to the “real world” of innovation, the answer is immediately. During our 48 hour Lean StartIN workshop, we throw 40+ newly hired employees (recent college graduates) into the deep end of innovation. Diana Samuels from the Silicon Valley Business Journal joined us at Intuit to observe the new hires experiencing our lean startup workshop. As luck would have it, she joined the event just as teams were experiencing the most challenging stages of their customer development journey. Virtually all teams were discovering their initial assumptions were wrong, and were deciding what to do next…
