It’s a bracing reality of 21st-century business: Most start-ups fail. What matters is how companies respond to failure - and how they break bad habits to foster innovation. In this invigorating conversation, you’ll hear how entrepreneur and author Eric Ries learned the hard way that it’s not enough to have a great idea. Successful businesses must continually test and refine products, leveraging feedback from real customers to make incremental improvements.

Ries' insights are valuable at every professional level. CEOs can foster smaller, more focused teams driven by experimentation and meaningful pivots. Employees can learn that innovative thinking can come from anyone, gain the confidence to share their ideas, and discover the right channels to be heard.

Key Takeaways:

• Why a great idea at the wrong time is the same as a bad idea
• Why the focus on the "launch" can sabotage a project’s success
• How to sharpen your team’s efforts with smart, incremental changes
• How what you learn from a failure can be the best idea for a successful new product
• What a "minimum viable product" (MVP) is and how it can help your team learn

About the Mentor:

Eric Ries is an entrepreneur and author of The Lean Startup and the popular blog Startup Lessons Learned. He co-founded and served as CTO of IMVU, his third startup, and has advised a number of startups, large companies, and venture capital firms. He is an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Harvard Business School. His Lean Startup methodology has been written about in New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and numerous blogs.