Lean internal startups: Challenges and lessons learned

Abstract

To compete in this age of disruption, large and established organizations cannot rely on the traditional way of advancement, which focuses on cost efficiency, lead time reduction, or quality improvement. They are now looking for new ways to innovate like startups. With greater resource in-house, they hope that they can bring innovative products to market with new customer value as startups do. Along with it, the awareness and adoption of the Lean startup approach have grown rapidly amongst large and established organizations in recent years. While Lean startup method is originated from the software startup community, the core ideas behind Lean startup can offer benefits for large companies as well. If the obstacles can be minimized, the opportunities can be very beneficial to leverage software product innovation. This chapter illustrates some of the typical challenges that were met during real-world new Lean internal startups, and how they were solved.