SGS Seminar on “Increasing the Successful Rate of Your New Business (Lead Startup)”

With the support of the Hong Kong government in creating new things, the number of Startup companies and innovative service as well as product are increasing tremendously.  A seminar named “Increasing the Successful Rate of Your New Business” organized by SGS on 5^th Oct 2018.  Lean Startup (LSU) is a powerful and worldwide used tool for a new business to adopt and this seminar aimed to introduce key components of LSU and its method, as well as, linking Design Thinking with LSU for new product development.  Before the seminar, I took a photo with Dr. Bernard Cheng. 

Ms. Sharon Li (Senior Account Executive, SGS) arranged the seminar and she had joined HKSQ GMP workshop before.

I also met Minda’s old colleague Ms. Willy Lok (Associate Production Manager, DiagCor Life Science Ltd.).

In the beginning, Dr. Bernard Cheng (Principal Consultant, BC Sustainability Consulting) briefed course outline.  He would introduced LSU concept and framework and then ran workshop for our practice. Dr. Cheng said 70% of your memory came from participation in Hands-on Workshop based on Edgar Dale’s Cone of Experience.

Then Dr. Cheng asked us to introduce ourselves and separated into two group.  Each group identified one new product for workshop.  Since our team had mobile trader, brand trader, cosmetic primary packaging and startup incubator, our proposed product named “Digital Lipstick”.

Dr. Cheng briefed the top 10 startup mistakes and the number 1 was building something no body wants.  So our first exercise was ranking (from 1 to 10) our product based on the six LSU questions:

i)                    Seriousness of the problem

ii)                  Enough potential customer

iii)                How important to buyers to solve it

iv)                Effectiveness of solution

v)                  Commercial value

vi)                Barrier of entry

After that Dr. Cheng briefed the concept of Startup that was human institution to create something new under extremely uncertainty conditions.  For Lean Startup (LSU), they didn’t believe in business plan (e.g. 5-year business plan) but business model.  They employed Minimum Viable Product (MVP) because it could be changed or pivot (華麗轉身) until arriving at a workable business plan.  Lead Startup written by Eric Ries on 2011 and the key process was Build – Measure – Learn.  Then 3 stages of LSU were mentioned below:

i)                    Problem / Solution Fit

ii)                  Product / Market Fit

iii)                Scale

Dr. Cheng stated 3 general risk of a startup included Product risk, Customer risk and Market risk that could be reduced by using Lean Canvas.  And then we needed to identified top 3 problems and found customer segment had that pain.

Our exercise result

And then Ms. Sharon Li became our customer for interview.  We found that there were some pain points we hadn’t considered before.  Moreover, we could develop Empathy Map and Persona.  Empathy come from interview, data collection, shadowing (experience) and observation.

At the end, Dr. Cheng introduced the system integrated Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Agile.

I got insight and learnt a new thing that Lean Canvas was found to modify the Business Model Canvas which I learnt before.

Reference:

SGS Academy – http://www.sgs.com/en/solutions/sgs-academy

20170804: SGS Seminar on “How Sustainability Sparks Innovation” - https://qualityalchemist.blogspot.com/2017/08/sgs-seminar-on-how-sustainability.html

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