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

Established organizations in both public and private sectors struggle to bring new, innovative ideas to life. Countless innovation programs have mixed track records, with most failing to deliver meaningful results. Many innovation initiatives fail because they do not get the momentum they need early on, they start in the wrong place, they are structured to deliver the wrong type of outcome, or they focus on the wrong problems and assumptions. There are many possibilities, and launching the wrong kind of program can doom an initiative before the first idea is generated.

This book takes you through a step-by-step approach that will enable you to select, structure, and deliver the right type of initiative to nurture and incubate your new and innovative ideas, and ensure that they have the best possible chance to succeed. It discusses what must be considered to properly structure your program, including important differences required when delivering new programs, projects, or public sector initiatives, and insight on additional requirements if your solutions include physical components. It is filled with questions, examples, artifacts, and tools to help you make key choices, and includes frameworks and examples that will help accelerate your deployment.

• Build your initiative or program, step-by-step, and measure its effectiveness
• Know what to consider when creating your innovation or incubation program, framework, or approach
• Understand how innovative ideas differ, why that's important, and why different approaches are required for each
• Select and structure your initiative, program, or approach to bring new, valuable ideas to life, whether they are new products, new programs, or internal projects
  
• Create the conditions for repeatable innovation, acceleration, or incubation
• Know the common impediments to innovation in established public and private sector organizations
• Avoid the key obstacles and trapdoors to successful innovation and incubation initiatives and programs
• Successfully prepare and lay a solid foundation for your initiative or program
• Continuously improve your program, framework, or approach
  

Who This Book Is For

People addressing impediments to incubating new ideas in established private/public sector organizations such as: executives looking to deliver new ideas; people responsible for the creation and operation of incubation, innovation, and accelerator programs; business executives and leadership teams who are stagnating or shrinking; technical leaders struggling to deliver innovative products and programs; consultants helping organizations overcome innovation challenges; entrepreneurs; innovators working for mid- to large-sized organizations who are frustrated with roadblocks; program developers, program managers, Scrum masters, and product owners

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".