Lean startup in large companies

Steve Blank puts it plainly: a large company is not a larger version of a startup. It already has customers, revenue and processes, and all three pull toward running today’s business.

Start with his conversation with Alexander Osterwalder on whether big companies can innovate better than startups, then what lean startup changes for large French companies, and the five principles of The Corporate Startup.

The cases come next. GE, Toyota, Intuit, Nordstrom, Bayer and Neopost each show lean startup at work inside a group, and Renault’s Le Square shows an open innovation lab. Nissan gets a section of its own: an intrapreneur’s diary at the Nissan Innovation Lab in Paris, then the whole story in “And the car turned red”.

Then what makes it work: running MVPs inside a big company, lean practices that stay stuck in their silos, innovation that becomes a silo of its own, and a digital transformation that starts with people rather than tools.

For more stories from French companies, the podcast Oser, puis doser follows intrapreneurs at Bouygues, Leroy Merlin, Total and others, in French.