Ten years of Idea to Impact Workshops
On 1 July 2015, Petr Adamek and I delivered the first CBRIN lean innovation workshop. A bit over ten years later our workshop program is still going strong, now under the program name Idea to Impact. We don’t have an accurate count of all the participants but we do have 1,920 individual feedback form responses which have guided us in refining and improving over the years.
In this post I’d like to reflect on what’s changed, what’s stayed the same, and why Idea to Impact has consistently been our most important program for entrepreneurs.
From the start the workshops have centred around lean startup principles like exploring and refining value proposition by engaging with customers. This hasn’t changed. While we have made many refinements some of our current slides are unchanged since 2015.
Finding and maintaining product-market fit remains the most important challenge for innovative companies. Founder conversations that start with other challenges, for example capital raising, often come back to this. We consistently find its a lot easier to help scaleups where the leaders are confident with lean startup methods from the workshops. So we’re confident this aspect of the workshop program is going to remain central.
The core workshop experience remains interactive - practicing the methods and applying them to your own projects. Our belief that the right way to learn startup methods is by doing them with peers and facilitated by experienced innovation experts remains unchanged.
However, some things have changed. While we still use the business model canvas we do spend more time on revenue, costs and unit economics while we put less time on fleshing out the activities and channels than previously.
In response to needs we observed in our community we’ve added new content. Targeted content and activities on the competitive landscape, metrics, how capital investment works, sales, and marketing for startups are now included and highly rated by participants.
Founders have always had access to fantastic videos, blogs, podcasts and programs delivered by world-leading experts like Steve Blank and world-leading programs like Ycombinator startup school. Now you can also chat to AI to rapidly learn any topic. But we believe that often this information is not suited to our own context. And the experience of practicing and getting feedback in person is growing more important. That’s why we are confident that something like idea to impact will still be important for at least the next ten years.
>> https://cbrin.com.au/programs/idea-to-impact,
