Digital Boot Camp: Start-Up Style in NYC

At the end of each day, a team of ‘Visualizers’ joined our boot camp to help illustrate our business ideas. Above is an example of their work. A few weeks ago, a number of digitally-focused ECLPs and ECLP alums participated in a weeklong Digital Boot Camp hosted by General Assembly, ‘GA’ for short. Kris Kaneta, an ECLP alum who was recently named Director of Marketing for GE Healthcare Global Services, provided a short summary of the week to his team, which appears below.

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Last week I had an incredibly unique opportunity sponsored by GE Corporate’s digital team where I spent a week at General Assembly – an NYC based start-up “community” – literally a campus community built around serving start-ups from office space to networking to classes and coaching. Think of it as a think tank for start-ups, by start-ups.

Thought I’d share some of my takeaways from that week. The goal was to bring together marketers from across GE and expose us to start-up culture. What makes for a successful start-up? What are the challenges? How do they collaborate? Innovate? Etc. And more importantly, how can we at GE behave more like a start-up to drive innovation. Here are some of my notes:

1. Don’t be afraid to share good ideas. The devil is in the details… if you’re worried that your idea will get stolen, it probably wasn’t that good to begin with. Instead, think about how sharing it can help make it better. Innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
2. Focus on developing and bringing to market a minimally viable product. And then learn quickly. We talked about how products / services like Facebook came to market with a very simple experience. But over time, that ecosystem has blossomed into something far greater… Focus on delivering some sort of product early on and leverage the opportunity to learn and decide whether or not to keep pushing forward.
3. It’s not “CAN I build this product”. It’s “SHOULD I build this product”. In new product development – focus on doing ONE thing right. “What is the one thing this product HAS to do?”
4. Every decision adds complexity. More choices in your offering is not the same as adding value.
5. Ask yourself if your data is really all that proprietary… we discussed API’s a lot and for many of our businesses, we depend on a tremendous amount of data. How can we create a better user experience that is holistically sound but provided by many. Case in point, Twitter (fail whales aside) solidified their position by giving away the data and building an ecosystem around that data.
6. Finally, think like a user. And NOT like a marketer. The experience is the brand… It occurred to us how little time some of us spend really thinking about the “experience”… It’s not just about new products and services. How do we get better tied into creating the experience?

Would love to hear what other people think about start-up culture. I personally have never worked in a start-up, and so in a lot of ways am corporate through and through. Needless to say, I was definitely pushed to think differently about how we can better spur innovation at GE, not only within the organization but also more broadly across our users and external stakeholders. 

Kris and Ana, a CLP from Brazil, pitch a “start-up” digital idea for GE Healthcare ;Jerome, an ECLP alum from Capital, and Ana share a plan to mobilize Electric Vehicle charging

Kris’ participation in this boot camp demonstrates one of the true bonuses of ECLP: the opportunities to continue learning and developing are numerous, even after graduating from the program! For those who are curious about Kris, here’s a short bio:

Kris Kaneta has more than a decade of sales and marketing experience, previously holding leadership roles at Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase and First National Bank Holdings. After completing his MBA at Duke University, he joined GE Capital in 2007 by way of the Experienced Commercial Leadership Program (ECLP) and transitioned to GE Healthcare in 2008. In his final ECLP rotation, Kris led the launch of AgileTrac, a real-time, location-based asset management & patient flow solution, and one GE’s seven inaugural healthymagination innovations. For the last two years Kris has been responsible for growing and developing the Americas Asset Management portfolio, successfully launching two more business critical offerings. Kris was recently named Director of Marketing for GE Healthcare Global Services, and will be responsible for the broader global marketing strategy of the Asset Management business. Kris and his wife are busy raising a Ninja-Jedi-aspiring five year old boy. Kris also remains an active musician and youth mentor in the local community. You can follow him on Twitter.  

Comments

[Schmidt]

I love your article. It's nice to see that NYC offers opportunities to learn about start ups. I totally agree about sharing ideas since the EXECUTION is the most important part of a good idea.

Well written.

[vacuum cleaning]

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