Lean Startup vs Lean Thinking at Toyota — reflections from someone on the inside

It’s been about nine months since I left a job in Toyota’s Strategic Finance Group for an opportunity to return to China to work for Originate China. At Originate, we create innovative web and mobile apps for clients and also based on our own internally generated ideas, and we also work with entrepreneurs to support their growth by providing strategy and engineering expertise. We are an agile development shop and focus on being nimble, which makes the Lean Startup methodology a great fit for our work.

While working in various business functions at Toyota for over 5 years,[1] I was able to see first-hand how Lean Manufacturing and the Toyota Production System has been applied to non-manufacturing functions. I learned how this methodology can be very effective within Toyota, but also how the Toyota approach to Lean Thinking in a business context with a focus on consensus-building can sometimes slow decision-making to a crawl, making the business anything but nimble. I am therefore in the unique position to apply the Lean Startup methodology to our business in China while avoiding some of the features of Toyota’s approach that aren’t ideal for startups.
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Monetizing apps in China – The Freemium model

There are many challenges facing web and mobile startups in China, including an incredibly dynamic market, keeping your staff from leaving you for one of your competitors and taking your Intellectual Property with them, and copycats that will appear within days of you gaining any interest from consumers or the press. But even if you are able to overcome these challenges and are able gain traction with your mobile or web app, it can be very difficult to get Chinese consumers to pay for your product or service.[1]

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Requiring Weibo users to register their accounts

According to new Chinese regulations going into affect on March 16th, all weibo (microblog) users in China will be required to register their real identities to continue posting weibo messages. With the pace of new user signups already slowing, there are predictions that Sina and Tencent, the two major weibo services in China, will see a significant drop in the number of users once we reach the deadline and that this will severely limit what has become a relatively open platform for speech in China.

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Microblogging (Tweeting) in China – the basics

Weibo (微博) is the name for microblogging (tweeting) in China. While it is extremely difficult to find reliable data regarding Chinese weibo users, official reports estimate that there were 250M weibo users in China at the end of 2011.[1] Comparing this to the 100M total users Twitter reported in September, 2011[2] puts this massive number into perspective. And from personal experience I can tell you that Chinese microblogging is at least as popular as Twitter in the US and, from what I can tell, that popularity isn’t waning.
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Innovation, and imitation, in China

Whenever I am talking with anyone about entrepreneurship in China, we end up discussing innovation. And I am nearly always asked whether I see real innovation in China, or if the “innovation” is really just imitation. While this a very nuanced topic I plan to explore in many posts, in this post I wanted to discuss just one example of innovation flowing from imitation in China. This example blurs the lines between innovation and imitation for me, and reminds me that innovation is often just taking someone’s idea and tweaking it a bit. So while when I picture innovation I often imagine a creative genius with an epiphany, innovation is more frequently found when one idea is tweaked, or when multiple ideas are put together in novel ways. In business, this generally stems from solving problems faced by your customers in novel ways.
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Expanding your network

Many people feel an aversion towards “networking” because it feels too forced. If this is how you feel about networking, then maybe it’ll make it easier if you just think about it as meeting people rather than “networking”. Networking doesn’t have to be about wanting to get something from the people you meet, you can make it about either helping the people you meet, or even just making friends for its own sake. In fact, I find that the latter two are often the best ways to think about networking. Meet people, see what you can do to help them, and then just see what other opportunities may come up in the future.

I’ve always been pleasantly surprised by how friendly other foreigners living in China are, and how willing they are to just strike up a conversation. If nothing else, you always one have thing in common: that you are both living in a foreign land. So one great way to expand your social or business network is simply to strike up conversations with a lot of people. You simply never know what will come of it, be it a long-term, close friendship or a long-term business relationship that wasn’t even conceived of when you first met.
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