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Bringing Lean Startup to Life at GE
Bringing Lean Startup to Life at GE by Eric Ries
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Bringing Lean Startup to Life at GE
By sarahm on Nov 19, 2012 07:22 am
Guest post by Sarah Milstein, co-host of The Lean Startup Conference.
At a party in NYC recently, I was challenged by a VC to namethe biggest company currently using Lean Startup practices. I think he expectedme to describe a medium-sized startup or maybe some small, old-school mediaorganization. So his eyebrows jumped when I said that GE is the largest companywe know of. There are at leasttwo companies in the world bigger than GE, so there’s room to expand.But GE is not alone among Fortune 500s. Indeed, it’s part of a large andgrowing group of enterprise firms incorporating Lean Startup techniques, andwe’re very excited to have GE SVP and CMO Beth Comstock join us this year at The Lean Startup Conference.
Although everyone knows GE, Beth is new to many people inour community, so we’ve created a backgrounder for you. The two people whocontributed to it, writer Lisa Regan and marketing coordinator Michele Kimble,both sent me notes about how interesting and impressive Beth is. Join us on December 3 to see her in person.
Beth is Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer atGE, but her work defies the standard understanding of big corporate business.In a career that has moved from GE to NBC Universal and back to GE, she hasbrought technological innovation and agile business techniques to two of theUS’s biggest legacy corporations.
As SVP and CMO at GE since 2008, Comstock is responsible fortwo major initiatives that use the capabilities of the corporation to identifyand implement the best ideas offered by the crowd. She is the force behind theecomagination and healthymagination programs, initiatives that tackle theenvironment and healthcare—two of the more pressing areas of concern in GE’sbusiness area. Prior to taking on her current position at GE, Comstock was thePresident of Integrated Media at NBC Universal, where she took a traditionalmedia company forward across new media platforms, heading the digital mediateam and shepherding the development of Hulu.com and Peacock Equity as well as the acquisition of ivillage.com.(She is also a member of Nike’s Board ofDirectors and Trustee president of the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt NationalDesign Museum.)
While working within big corporations, Comstock hasnonetheless pursued entrepreneurial methods—seeking out the best ideas,whatever their source, and pushing a large company like GE to adapt to a fluidand collaborative environment, rather than compressing ideas to fit a corporatemodel. As shetold Fast Company last year, she has actively sought to shake upGE’s processes. "Our traditional teams are too slow. We're not prototypingfast enough, not innovating fast enough. We need to systematize change."
At the same time, Comstock has brought the power of a largecompany to bear on big problems, using a model of entrepreneurialproblem-solving to take on environmental and healthcare innovation of the kindthat is often left to government. “Innovation can originate from anywhere, atanytime,” Comstockhas written. “Tocompete in the global marketplace, companies like GE need an approach toinnovation that supports open collaboration and partnership, especially whendealing with big issues like the environment or healthcare that are toocomplicated for any one entity to solve alone.”
Enter the healthymagination project.Healthymagination is a cooperative endeavor in healthcare, which along withenergy and transportation, is one of GE’s primary technological fields. The project’sintent is to find innovative approaches to improving medical outcomes worldwide,both in identifying areas that demand and are available to change, and in seekingout new ways ofaddressing them. These will be solutions that range from technologicaladvancements to new delivery systems to research projects and data collection.
Breast cancer screening exemplifies the kind of complexhealthcare questions that Comstock is trying to untangle, where barriers tobetter care are not only or even primarily technological, but involve a complex mixture of social, cultural,technological and economic factors. InSaudi Arabia, for example, where screening rates are low due to both culturalstigma around the female body and women’s fear of diagnosis, healthymaginationhas looked to solutions going farbeyond just new equipment. “In thecase of breast cancer, we can’t just show up with a mammography screeningdevice and consider the problem solved,” Comstockhas said. This is the kind of area where researchers most familiarwith the community will offer the most effective new ideas, but where a companywith GE’s reach and ability to deliver can bring those ideas to fruition.
If open innovation is one side of the healthymaginationprogram, the other is “reverse innovation,” creating technology for thedeveloping world that then becomes used in industrialized countries. Thequestion, Comstocksays,is, “How do you put resources in a market, then innovate from that market back,creating totally new offerings in healthcare and energy?” Reverse innovation meanshelping researchers and entrepreneurs partner with health care providers todevelop immediate, deliverable solutions to specific, local problems. AsComstock writes, “Emerging markets areproving to be laboratories for the developed world—they demand the besttechnology at the best price point.”
The ecomagination programat GE applies similar open innovation methods to a different problem: theenvironment and energy use. As Comstock phrases it, “In theglobal energy economy, we face a chasm between nascent ideas with great promiseand those that are commercially available to impact change today.”
Between ecomagination and healthymagination, Comstock hastried to go far beyond traditional corporate philanthropy. Her work takes global problems—ones that seem utterlyresistant to any individual’s effort at change—and uses the power of a majorcorporation to leverage impact on behalf of innovative ideas.
