Innovation Practice articles

Innovation Practice is where the rubber meets the road. It is where ideas are generated, tested and taken to scale. The other elements of the ecosystem cannot thrive without a great innovation practice in place. So a clear understanding of innovation practice and how to execute it correctly is essential.

The blogs discuss topics like experimenting, lean startup and customer interviewing. To provide all the information needed to understand and execute innovation practice correctly.


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Innovation Practice
How to start with business model validation today? (+Template)

One of the hardest things we notice amongst the dozen of companies we worked with, is creating a structured approach to validating business models, or business ideas. In this blog, we discuss how to start with business model validation. Also, we provide a template so you can start validating your business model immediately. Validating a […]


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Innovation Ecosystem
When ‘mindset’​ is the biggest hurdle for innovation in your company.

For most executives, it’s people and culture that drive innovation. They feel that a different, more creative mindset from employees will help improve innovation company-wide. Innovation managers, on the other hand, blame the lack of an ‘innovation’ mindset from leadership for not being able to advance in innovation.  Mindset has become the scapegoat for not […]


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Lean Startup
Creating a problem statement for a startup (proven formula + examples)

Often, a startup idea begins with the idea for a solution. Although this makes sense, it is the problem of a customer segment that is the starting point of your startup. You need to make sure to find a real customer segment with a real problem before working out a solution, you do this by […]


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Lean Startup
Pricing experiments to find out if and what your customer will pay

To find out if and what your customer is willing to pay for your product, we run pricing experiments. In this blog, we describe a couple of experiments that we have used ourselves. An excellent way to test a revenue model without having your final solution ready is via a Dry Wallet. You create a […]


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Innovation Practice
Testing Business Ideas with GroundControl

At GroundControl we’re a big fan of David Bland’s Testing Business Ideas book because it closely matches how we look at the journey from a great idea to a validated business model and it gives a lot of examples of which experiments you can run to de-risk as much as possible. You could even say that GroundControl is Testing Business Ideas software.


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Lean Startup
Why The Mom Test is still one of the best startup books

Recently, we worked together with author Rob Fitzpatrick to translate The Mom Test into Dutch. It’s one of the first books that we recommend to anyone that is involved with (corporate) startups or innovation. At the time of writing this, Rob’s book is more than 6 years old. You’ll find that plenty of books on […]


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Innovation Practice
The Wizard of Oz Prototyping VS Concierge Testing

The best way to validate a value proposition is by testing if the solution delivers the value the customer is looking for. To test your value proposition, you need a way to deliver the same value to the customer as the final product will deliver. So you need an experiment that mimics the value of […]


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Lean Startup
How to turn your risky assumptions into Experiments

Once you have filled in your NEXT Canvas, you are stuck with a pile of stickies filled with assumptions. Do they all need to be tested? Is every single one of them risky? Where do I start?! 1. Determine the impact and evidence of each assumption There are a couple of tools that can help […]


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Lean Startup
Why we stopped building MVP’s

At NEXT we decided to drop the word MVP and use solution experiment, prototype, or first version instead.


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Lean Startup
How to apply Agile to validate business models: the Lean Sprint

Most startups are familiar with agile development sprints of 1 or 2 weeks. They try to plan work that ‘belongs’ together and release a new version either at the end of the sprint or when the work is done. That structure works pretty well and helps to build a flow into your company. We used […]


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Innovation Practice
Braintrust: a format for powerful peer-to-peer mentoring

For three years in a row, the most valued session during the Rockstart Accelerator programs has been the Braintrust. Esther introduced it as Lean Mentor checkins, based on Salim Virani‘s Braintrust model, but it has slowly evolved in much more and is now a standard part of our proven Lean Startup curriculum. What is a […]


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Innovation Practice
Lean Startup experiments: How to get started with the 18 most used experiment examples

Learn how to run successful lean startup experiments and get inspired by reading about the most used experiments used by startups.


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