NextTalk: Venture Design- Determining Success

I had a great time talking with entrepreneurs at Santa Cruz Nextspace about Venture Design. We talked about how to take the best of design thinking, Lean Startup, customer development, and agile and package it into an actionable program (Venture Design).

See below for slides and an event description.

EVENT DESCRIPTION

If you’re reading this, you probably live near the general vicinity of Silicon Valley, aka ‘Hype Central’. There are a lot of strong ideas out there for creating better products and companies. The challenge for 98% of projects is applying them with the consistency and coherency to have them deliver results.

In this talk, Alex Cowan will walk you through Venture Design, a set of approaches and tools for creating better products and companies. This includes but isn’t limited to elements of design thinking, Lean Startup, agile and use of the business model canvas. You’ll take away a set of steps that you can apply to your projects immediately with a minimal (but consistent) application of time and energy.

Alex is the CTO of Leonid Systems, an enterprise software startup with offices in the Bay Area, Washington, Toronto and various points abroad. Leonid works with communications and SaaS providers on innovative solutions to leverage and growth their franchise. He’s also the Author of ‘Starting a Tech Business’ (Wiley, 2012), a primer for non-engineers who want to up their game with the latest techniques and foundations concepts in product development.