Bjorn Uhss, Founder 22tribes.com – Lean Go-To-Market & Global Expansion Strategy

Björn Uhss (@faiM) runs the Digital Marketing and Corporate Innovation consultancy 22Tribes that helps startups and big corporations develop new disruptive products and services with the Lean methodology.

As a certified innovation professional, he has worked and mentored with New York Times bestselling authors Eric Ries (The Lean Startup) and Brant Cooper (The Lean Entrepreneur, The Lean Brand), MovesTheNeedle), as well as Academy of Corporate Entrepreneurship.

What we will cover in the Lean talk

Bjorn will give a short presentation and talk with case studies and examples and then cover various stories and topics including Lean startup in established organisations, corporate entrepreneurship/intrapreneurship, design thinking, customer empathy and rapid prototyping. There will be a presentation and time for Q&As and to discuss the questions such as the following:

“Why Corporates start building internal entrepreneurs as a new skilled workforce ready for the future”

“How to innovate in big and small organisations while running the day to day job?”

“How launch in days, not months – independently from the size of your business”” What’s the difference: London vs. Berlin vs. Barcelona Startup, Accelerator and Corporate Incubator Ecosystem”

Björn’s Experience at Intuit

Intuit has been described by Forbes as “The 20 Year Old Startup” and one of the Fortune 100 most admired Software Companies in the Silicon Valley – not because they share the campus with Google, but because of their innovation, experimentation and customer-focused culture. The maker of TurboTax and Quicken is a financial rich Silicon Valley corporation with almost 10,000 employees that sells financial management products to individuals and small businesses and says that 20 percent of the US GDP flows through their Quickbooks SaaS cloud software.

How did they replace existing players withing a few years to become the dominant market leader? How does a billion-dollar corporation executes towards their long term plan of global market expansion and innovate at the same time to stay relevant? Intuit designed their own Design4Delight methodology combining customer empathy, design thinking and lean startup principles empowering their employees to become internal entrepreneurs.

Before starting 22tiribes.com, Björn worked on the the Global Expansion & Innovation team at Intuit QuickBooks (SaaS) where he was part of the Global Go To Market Team and where he trained internal and external teams in Lean Product & Rapid Customer Development. He is equipped with a lot of insights of how the team tried to bring the in the US & Canada successful product into 140 new markets using lean principles straight from the beginning without spending months and millions on inefficient marketing campaigns but use small lean teams to test and experiment their way forward.

Additional / Pre-reads: Forbes – Why Intuit is more innovative than your company

How big companies can innovate: Lean Enterprise Acceleration Programme (4 min video) by Schibsted(Infojobs, 20 minutos, coches.net, fotocasa, segundamano)
Intuits journey (3 min video) and it’s innovation culture (video)