Date: Wednesday, 3rd February 2016

Time: 19:00 – 20:30

Admission Free: https://building-lean-startup.eventbrite.ie

Have you built a product that someone wants? Launching a new enterprise—whether it’s a tech start-up, a small business, or an initiative within a large corporation—has always been a hit-or-miss proposition. According to the decades-old formula, you write a business plan, pitch it to investors, assemble a team, introduce a product, and start selling as hard as you can. And somewhere in this sequence of events, you’ll probably suffer a fatal setback. The odds are not with you: As new research by Harvard Business School’s Shikhar Ghosh shows, 75% of all start-ups fail.

But recently an important countervailing force has emerged, one that can make the process of starting a company less risky. It’s a methodology called the “lean start-up,” and it favours experimentation over-elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition and iterative design over traditional “big design up front” development. Although the methodology is just a few years old, its concepts—such as “minimum viable product” and “pivoting”—have quickly taken root in the start-up world, and business schools have already begun adapting their curricula to teach them.

The lean start-up movement hasn’t gone totally mainstream, however, and we have yet to feel its full impact. In many ways it is roughly where the big data movement was five years ago—consisting mainly of a buzzword that’s not yet widely understood, whose implications companies are just beginning to grasp. But as its practices spread, they’re turning the conventional wisdom about entrepreneurship on its head. New ventures of all kinds are attempting to improve their chances of success by following its principles of failing fast and continually learning. And despite the methodology’s name, in the long term some of its biggest payoffs may be gained by the large companies that embrace it.

In this talk, Raomal Perera will talk about the first steps in product development. he’ll introduce the terms, ‘Finding the Problem-Solution fit’ and ‘Product Market fit’. He’ll offer a brief overview of lean start-up techniques and how they’ve evolved. Most important, he’ll explain how, in combination with other business trends, they could ignite a new entrepreneurial economy.

Raomal is an educator and loves to work with entrepreneurs. However his primary role is helping established businesses make innovation work. He uses an interesting mix of his hands-on experience of building successful companies and the more recent experience of academia and research in helping companies GET, KEEP and GROW their customers, using a number of highly effective tools and processes. Follow his work on www.LeanDisruptor.com

Raomal co-founded two technology companies; ISOCOR was listed on NASDAQ in 1996 and subsequently acquired by Critical Path in 1999. Network365 acquired US company iPin and formed Valista in 2003. Valista was acquired by Aepona in 2009 and Aepona was acqured by Intel in 2013. 

Raomal also teaches at a number of other universities on business planning, fund raising, leadership using your emotional capital and customer development using lean methodologies.

Raomal was a recipient of the Irish Software Association’s (ISA) Outstanding Software Achievement Award in 2003. He was also a finalist in the Ernst & Young ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’ awards. Raomal was one of 40 entrepreneurs worldwide chosen to the prestigious World Economic Forum (WEF) as a technology pioneer. Headed by Raomal, Valista also won a number of industry accolades, ranging from the Wall Street Journal Innovation GOLD award for business, and the Mobile World Congress Award for the most innovative product.

Refresh Boyne is a community of designers and developers working to refresh the creative, technical, and professional culture of the New Media industry in the Boyne region.

www.refreshboyne.org

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