Tag Archive | Ola Sundell

Lean market entry – From startup to growth company successfully

Dec8

Ola Sundell, CEO of Hub Helsinki, introduced lean startup practices for SID students in November 2013 and gave a few hands-on tips and advices on how to increase your odds on building a successful business. Ola Sundell’s message for startup entrepreneurs was to build the minimum to learn the maximum and hit the markets as early as possible. This can be achieved by following Lean thinking and Lean startup practices.

Ola Sundell explained to us that on today’s markets good ideas alone don’t matter anymore. It’s all about creating value for your customers by solving their problems. If you want to be a successful startup you have to concentrate on entering the markets fast and finding your customers.

“If there aren’t a market for you, you have to fail. And you have to fail fast!”
– Ola Sundell

Ola Sundell at Laurea

Lean thinking

The term lean was first introduced by a research team headed by Jim Womack, Ph.D., at MIT’s International Motor Vehicle Program to describe Toyota’s business during the late 1980s. Toyota’s production system (TPS) is well-known for its focus on reduction of the original Toyota “seven wastes” to improve overall customer value. Since the lean thinking is based on lean manner of manufacturing has caused some to think that lean thinking can’t be utilized with product or service development but isn’t true. Lean thinking can be adopted into any type of business or process.

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Cut your time to market at half by lean service development

Dec3

Lean thinking

On 10 November 2013, Ola Sundell, CEO of Hub Helsinki, talked at Laurea University of Applied Sciences about one of the hottest topics of service design today: the concept of lean thinking. The basic idea of lean thinking is to produce maximum value to the customer with minimum waste. Ola gave us some guidelines on how to build up a start-up company by using this new approach.

Ola Sundell

Lean market entry and innovation paradigm change

In lean innovation the key to success is to find the right markets with the help of customers. The best way to enter the market is to start working with innovators and early adapters. Instead of expensive marketing campaigns, you can validate your ideas by using innovators and early adapters as a runway to the market. Ola Sundell even advised us to forget the open innovation paradigm where the keys to success are new ideas flowing in and out of the companies. Ideas are worth nothing if they aren’t selling.

A lean launch is a new way to enter the markets. In contrast to the traditional waterfall model, where you have different development phases from concept, development and testing to launching, lean launch means that you enter the markets right away with your product idea, targeting the customer with a minimum viable product.

Customer development methods – Learning is the core!

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