Guest post by Sarah Milstein, co-host of The Lean Startup Conference.
At a party in NYC recently, I was challenged by a VC to name
the biggest company currently using Lean Startup practices. I think he expected
me to describe a medium-sized startup or maybe some small, old-school media
organization. So his eyebrows jumped when I said that GE is the largest company
we know of. There are at least
two companies in the world bigger than GE, so there’s room to expand.
But GE is not alone among Fortune 500s. Indeed, it’s part of a large and
growing group of enterprise firms incorporating Lean Startup techniques, and
we’re very excited to have GE SVP and CMO Beth Comstock join us this year at The Lean Startup Conference.
Although everyone knows GE, Beth is new to many people in
our community, so we’ve created a backgrounder for you. The two people who
contributed to it, writer Lisa Regan and marketing coordinator Michele Kimble,
both sent me notes about how interesting and impressive Beth is. Join us on December 3 to see her in person.
Beth is Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at
GE, but her work defies the standard understanding of big corporate business.
In a career that has moved from GE to NBC Universal and back to GE, she has
brought technological innovation and agile business techniques to two of the
US’s biggest legacy corporations.
As SVP and CMO at GE since 2008, Comstock is responsible for
two major initiatives that use the capabilities of the corporation to identify
and implement the best ideas offered by the crowd. She is the force behind the
ecomagination and healthymagination programs, initiatives that tackle the
environment and healthcare—two of the more pressing areas of concern in GE’s
business area. She also runs GE Ventures, leading the company's efforts to partner with startups and entrepreneurs. Prior to taking on her current position at GE, Comstock was the
President of Integrated Media at NBC Universal, where she took a traditional
media company forward across new media platforms, heading the digital media
team and shepherding the development of Hulu.com and Peacock Equity as well as the acquisition of ivillage.com.
(She is also a member of Nike’s Board of
Directors and Trustee president of the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National
Design Museum.)
While working within big corporations, Comstock has
nonetheless pursued entrepreneurial methods—seeking out the best ideas,
whatever their source, and pushing a large company like GE to adapt to a fluid
and collaborative environment, rather than compressing ideas to fit a corporate
model. As she
told Fast Company last year, she has actively sought to shake up
GE’s processes. "Our traditional teams are too slow. We're not prototyping
fast enough, not innovating fast enough. We need to systematize change."
At the same time, Comstock has brought the power of a large
company to bear on big problems, using a model of entrepreneurial
problem-solving to take on environmental and healthcare innovation of the kind
that is often left to government. “Innovation can originate from anywhere, at
anytime,” Comstock
has written. “To
compete in the global marketplace, companies like GE need an approach to
innovation that supports open collaboration and partnership, especially when
dealing with big issues like the environment or healthcare that are too
complicated for any one entity to solve alone.”
Enter the healthymagination project.
Healthymagination is a cooperative endeavor in healthcare, which along with
energy and transportation, is one of GE’s primary technological fields. The project’s
intent is to find innovative approaches to improving medical outcomes worldwide,
both in identifying areas that demand and are available to change, and in seeking
out new ways of
addressing them. These will be solutions that range from technological
advancements to new delivery systems to research projects and data collection.
Breast cancer screening exemplifies the kind of complex
healthcare questions that Comstock is trying to untangle, where barriers to
better care are not only or even primarily technological, but involve a complex mixture of social, cultural,
technological and economic factors. In
Saudi Arabia, for example, where screening rates are low due to both cultural
stigma around the female body and women’s fear of diagnosis, healthymagination
has looked to solutions going far
beyond just new equipment. “In the
case of breast cancer, we can’t just show up with a mammography screening
device and consider the problem solved,” Comstock
has said. This is the kind of area where researchers most familiar
with the community will offer the most effective new ideas, but where a company
with GE’s reach and ability to deliver can bring those ideas to fruition.
If open innovation is one side of the healthymagination
program, the other is “reverse innovation,” creating technology for the
developing world that then becomes used in industrialized countries. The
question, Comstock
says,
is, “How do you put resources in a market, then innovate from that market back,
creating totally new offerings in healthcare and energy?” Reverse innovation means
helping researchers and entrepreneurs partner with health care providers to
develop immediate, deliverable solutions to specific, local problems. As
Comstock writes, “Emerging markets are
proving to be laboratories for the developed world—they demand the best
technology at the best price point.”
The ecomagination program
at GE applies similar open innovation methods to a different problem: the
environment and energy use. As Comstock phrases it, “In the
global energy economy, we face a chasm between nascent ideas with great promise
and those that are commercially available to impact change today.”
Between ecomagination and healthymagination, Comstock has
tried to go far beyond traditional corporate philanthropy. Her work takes global problems—ones that seem utterly
resistant to any individual’s effort at change—and uses the power of a major
corporation to leverage impact on behalf of innovative ideas.
