Innoway recently had the privilege of hosting a Lean Startup Night event in collaboration with Lean Startup Co and Dubai Future Foundation. It was an incredible event to be a part of, with startups, government, and corporates in the same room and happy to share their experiences.
Our speakers were especially willing to share the expertise they’d gained from their experiences driving innovation in both startups and corporates.
Here are some of the most important lessons we learned on the night.
1. Startups are more flexible and agile
Startups can easily run experiments and move fast. They also tend to have more space for creativity.
Paradoxically, the scarcity of money actually forces startups to be more creative when developing experiments to gather evidence and learnings to move forward.
2. Failure is part of the journey
Romeo Popentiu, best known as the founder of RentalSouk, shared how important failure has been in his entrepreneurial journey. This is his third startup venture and while it appears successful, he was quick to point out that he has already faced several challenges that forced him to start up the same idea all over again from scratch.
Ultimately, he pointed out, failure is only valuable if you learn from it and keep moving forward.
3. An early stage startup must inevitably be lean to survive
Dana Baki is the Co-Founder & COO of LUNCH:ON, one of the UAE’s hottest startups. In his talk he illustrated perfectly why early stage startups must be lean to survive.
LUNCH:ON managed its initial customer database on Excel in order to know how to design the app’s interface. Testing pivots on pricing models was communicated to customers before doing any investment or putting any minute to adapt/development the required code on the app.
If the startup had tried to make the changes first, it would’ve wasted time and money rolling back what didn’t work and wouldn’t be anywhere near as far down the road as it is now.
4. Corporates must systematise and reward innovation
When it came time to talk corporate innovation, one of the clearest lessons was that innovation needs to be systematised and rewarded the right way in order to be able to build it into a sustainable practice.
Corporates need to empower people to make a difference in their day to day work and make them feel like they count within a framework that clearly differentiates the different levels of innovation.
5. Small ideas can have a big impact
The amazing thing about innovating inside a corporate is that small ideas can have a huge impact, even within a big organization.
People need to be rewarded even for ideas that don’t move forward from ideation stage because innovation is a numbers game (a very low percentage of ideas lead to anything, but the results can be so big that is worth to constantly come up with ideas and test them).
Besides, the more people feel like they’ll be rewarded for ideas, the more ideas they’ll come up with, increasing the chances of one of them being a total game-changer.
If you’re interested in getting informed about the next Lean Startup Night Dubai, drop us an email to info@innoway.me
