Lean Innovation

Enterprise innovation is the key to staying ahead of the game in any industry. At Pathfinder, we specialize in enterprise innovation in healthcare using Lean Startup principles. Lean innovation is what enables us to minimize risk and time to market for the healthcare software and mobile applications we build for our clients. We are able to drastically increase user engagement with our process.

Pathfinder is at the forefront of applying Lean Startup principles to the enterprise environment. We are the primary sponsor and director of the Chicago Lean Startup Circle and Chicago Lean Startup Challenge. We have helped enterprise healthcare companies develop breakthrough new products, services and business models.

If you’re interested in an Enterprise Lean Innovation consultation for your company, please  Contact Us

The Innovation Gap

Most companies struggle to get value from their innovation efforts. We believe this is the result of a gap in how innovation is practiced.

There are many best practices for helping companies develop strategies for the future, for finding and generating ideas for new products and services, and for executing an established business model. But the process for getting from ideas to validated, and scalable business model, and for making investment decisions between different opportunities is muddled and inefficient.

What’s needed is a systematic way of validating and vetting those ideas, discovering business models that work, and determining how to allocate innovation budgets among competing projects.

Lean Innovation Fills the Gap

This is where the lean innovation approach comes in. It’s a data driven process specifically designed to reduce risk for new product development by focusing on the number one reason why new products fail: Premature scaling based on untested assumptions. It’s a process for finding a scalable business model, using rapid hypothesis testing through minimal experiments to reduce risk and eliminate waste. It’s being rapidly adopted in silicon valley and by pioneering enterprises around the world, and is supported by a growing body of best practices.

Lean Innovation Portfolio Management

We’ve incorporated this approach into a scalable portfolio management and governance model that provides a data driven, staged approach for evaluating and making innovation investment decisions.

Each stage of the process requires different activities and different skillets, from customer development to lean ux, agile development and test driven marketing and cohort analysis.

We’re applying this model with a number of pioneering enterprises in the healthcare, education, mobile and transportation industries, and have scaled this approach to managing over 100 concurrent innovation projects.