What Comes After 'Lean'?

Innovation Requires More Than Solutions

“What problem are you solving?”

If you’ve ever built a startup company, you have been asked this question. In fact, for most entrepreneurs my age, all of whom began their careers in the Web 2.0 era, this was the very first question we were required to answer if we wanted to start a business at all. We were weaned on “The Lean Startup”, a methodology for building products quickly and efficiently, which argued that if an entrepreneur could identify the problem they were trying to solve, they would then be able to narrow down the right customer segment and build the all-important ‘MVP’ (Minimum Viable Product). To be a ‘lean’ startup founder was to practice that oldest business adage, “the customer is always right”, at a speed befitting the digital age: find out who your customer is and what they want, then build it and ship it.?

I’ve spent much of my career as a ‘lean’ evangelist, whether I was building a new company from scratch or launching an intrapreneurial initiative from within the halls of a massive corporation. And despite the countless challenges I’ve faced in a given venture, I have always been secure in knowing that my business solved a specific problem. If it didn’t, that meant that it wasn’t a business–just an idea.?

Recently, however, I’ve begun to wonder if staying ‘lean’ is enough.

This past Friday, I was invited to speak to a group of entrepreneurial high schoolers at the CIC Coworking hub in Providence, Rhode Island. During the Q&A that followed our panel discussion, my co-panelists and I explained that no business can succeed without first answering that essential startup question: “What problem are you solving?”?

But the world these students are graduating into is so overrun with problems, that the idea of merely building solutions suddenly seemed insufficient.

Or, more specifically, the types of problems my generation of founders worked to solve–problems belonging to the so-called millennial lifestyle subsidy economy–struck me as unambitious. GrubHub, ClassPass, Foursquare and Tinder were all efficient methods for living an upper-middle-class life in an urban environment, but these businesses were not designed to address social, political or epidemiological challenges. They were designed to meet a narrowly defined demand independent of the larger social context.

I am not the first to notice this trend, but I did, on the Amtrak ride back home, feel compelled to push back against it.?

What if ‘solving a problem’ was the wrong way to think about innovation? What if the world’s interconnected challenges, from ascendant illiberalism to record-breaking carbon emissions rates to surging income inequality, could not be so easily categorized, and so would not be so easily ‘solved’? While the ‘lean’ methodology might be sufficient for addressing customer-centric problems, it falls short of achieving the longer-term, larger-scale impact the next generation of innovators dream of realizing.??

What if building the future didn’t involve thinking about problems at all, but rather, focusing on our dreams??

Innovation Requires Leadership

The central premise of Dreams and Details, the book that kickstarted the founding of Idonea, is that leadership, more than any technology product or service, is the key to fostering innovation and spurring real change. And it argues that instead of starting with the problem, leaders should first identify an ambitious dream for their organization, and then work out the crucial details necessary to realize that dream. An example frequently used by the authors is the space race of the 1960’s. When President Kennedy declared that the United States “...should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon…” he was announcing a dream, not building an MVP; it would take eight more years of figuring out the details before Apollo 11 made history.

The ‘Dreams and Details’ methodology is an argument for optimism–something I’ve sorely needed these past few years, and which, more importantly, our future leaders require if they are going to build the next generation of breakthrough innovations. Problems tend to inspire the best solutions when they are specific. But dreams are most ambitious when they are shared; there is collective power in a dream.

And at Idonea, whether our clients are corporate executives trying to innovate from inside their complex, bureaucratic firm, or politicians trying to realize their vision for social change from within the sclerotic halls of government, I have seen what’s possible when innovations begin with a dream, and not with a problem.

I know this can all sound a bit corny. I mean, I think I wrote the word ‘dream’ like half a dozen times in the last two paragraphs. I also know that the work required to build from scratch–the work of a traditional ‘lean’ founder–is much different than the work of building from within an existing institution.

But so many of the trends that helped push my generation of founders onto the path of entrepreneurship in the first place–social inequity, political division, the destruction of our planet–have not only continued, they have worsened. The digital innovations we pioneered, all designed to, yes, ‘solve problems’, have not done enough to improve society. The world is worse off today than it was when I was the same age as those students in Providence.?

If the millennial vision for innovation was centered around satisfying customer demand quickly and efficiently for specific customer segments, what comes next must expand the scope of what’s possible to include all stakeholders.

Where ‘lean’ offered specificity, ‘dreams’ can offer prosperity.

Enjoying what you're reading? Well, you’re in luck! On May 5th and 6th, Idonea is hosting our first-ever ‘Dreams and Details’ summit. You can attend this virtual event from anywhere in the world. Just sign up via the link below. Registration is free, but the spots are limited. Register here:?https://lnkd.in/e5WPb8_3?