Transformational Change through Lean Start-up at Perpetual

Challenge

Perpetual wanted to discover and identify new revenue generating opportunities especially in the area of the ageing population. Perpetual needed to validate/invalidate three opportunities that were derived from a previous Design Thinking piece of work. The Lean Startup methodology was used, running real experiments in the financial services sector.

Approach

From Design Thinking to a 12-week Lean Startup program

Perpetual, a leading financial services organisation heavily invested into innovation in order to avoid disruption and maintain a relevant business model into the future. The Strategy Group worked alongside Perpetual’s business teams to complete a Design Thinking project followed by a Lean Startup project focused on uncovering new revenue generating opportunities and customer-centric value propositions.

Within the initial Design Thinking project, The Strategy Group formed a joint team with Perpetual to identify three opportunities for Perpetual. Perpetual then decided to run a 12 week Lean Startup project in which teams for the three initiatives were established, and each team had to run experiments in real time.

To find market-solution fit for the identified ideas, the teams went through the 12-week program, each week running experiments on different elements of the Business Model Canvas. Every week there was a check-in to understand the outcomes of the experiments, and review the quality and validity of the results.

Outcomes

Fostering a transformational change through Lean Startup

The outcome was a validated business model for the three concepts, and a definite opportunity to take these concepts further. One in particular stood out as a significant opportunity and was pitched to the executive team for funding.

Additionally, the culture change that was emanated as a result of the program, was transformational. A key measure of success for the PerpetualExecutive was culture and capability development in Lean Startup. At the end of the program, every team member was now a practitioner of the methodology and the Lean Startup has been used elsewhere in the business for other projects as a result. This resulted in the building of entrepreneurial capability within a traditional financial services corporation.