By Linda Forrest
Happy Playbook release day, everyone! Today is the fateful day when Canada’s own Research in Motion begins selling its long awaited Playbook tablet. You might have heard that this was coming, as the media has been very hungry for news on tablets set to compete with iPad; it’s a topic we’ve covered here as well. You might also have heard that RIM has had a series of PR, well, disasters leading up to this release: from on-camera CEO breakdowns, to a cavalcade of bad reviews that suggest the product is not yet ready for market. What should have been an exciting and positive time has instead become a challenging time poised to test the mettle of the company and affect its long-term reputation in a highly competitive marketplace.
The recent PR missteps have been documented extensively elsewhere so rather than repeat them here in-depth, let’s look at the Playbook story as a whole and see what lessons can be learned for other companies bringing technology to market.
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This is the 12th article in a continuing series that examines the state of the ecosystem necessary to successfully bring technology to market. Based on dozens of interviews with entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, angel investors, business leaders, academics, tech-transfer experts and policy makers, this series looks at what is working and what can be improved in the go-to-market ecosystem in the United States, Canada and Britain. We invite your feedback.
By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
It’s fitting that we follow up last week’s post on the strategic value of marketing in its purest sense as a process for enabling customer validation and iterative product development with a definition of this thing called lean startup.
Strategic marketing is a fundamental aspect of the lean startup methodology, a methodology first defined by Eric Ries almost three years ago. And lean startup itself as a process for bringing technology to market warrants careful consideration by any entrepreneur in the socially enabled age of Web 2.0.
It’s fitting because just this month, Ries updated his definition of lean startup based on how the concept has evolved since it was first coined.
Ries defines lean “in the sense of low burn. Of course, many startups are capital efficient and generally frugal. But by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste.”
He also defines lean startup as an application of lean thinking, which at its most basic is about maximizing the value you provide to your customers while minimizing waste in your organization. If it ain’t focused on delivering value to the customer, get rid of it.
Ries further defines a lean startup as one that is powered by these drivers:
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By Francis Moran
There may be few products more reduced to commodity status than mass-produced beer. (As Monty Python almost said, “Why is mass-produced beer like making love in a canoe? They’re both fucking close to water.” The Python troupe, in the wonderful Hollywood Bowl rendition of their famous “Australian Philosophers Drinking Song,” were actually lampooning American beer, but I think the line holds up.) Still, this doesn’t prevent the big beer companies from constantly trying to introduce new elements they hope will boost their brand’s share of market by a percentage point or two. Who can blame them? Gain even one-tenth of a percentage point in new market share in Canada and you’ve boosted your revenues by some $90 million.
And so we have seen refinements of almost every sort imaginable. Ice beer, dry beer, lime-infused beer, beer in tall cans, cans that tell you when the beer is cold — countless such iterations have come and gone. You know one brewery has tripped onto something that’s working when all the rest pile on.
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This is the 11th article in a continuing series that examines the state of the ecosystem necessary to successfully bring technology to market. Based on dozens of interviews with entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, angel investors, business leaders, academics, tech-transfer experts and policy makers, this series looks at what is working and what can be improved in the go-to-market ecosystem in the United States, Canada and Britain. We invite your feedback.
By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
“Companies that can’t clearly articulate their customer and market are not real serious companies, they are research projects … Engineering and marketing need to work together from the get go.”
We began this series a couple of months ago with this timeless quote from Band of Angels’ Ronald Weissman. It strikes to the heart of what all of us here take as gospel.
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Thank you for being with us for the second month of our new blog. In case you missed any posts, here is a recap, beginning with, in chronological order, the lastest installments in our ongoing series on getting technology to market, The Commercialization Ecosystem, which explored startup incubation, the right stuff entrepreneurs need to succeed and other pearls of wisdom.
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By Linda Forrest
