Tag Archives: workshop

Meet the Workshop Sponsors

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The massive 2 day international startup conference BDL Accelerate 2015 will have over 100 startups exhibiting, 2 stages packed with panel discussions, keynotes, firesides, and 2 competitions, as well as 2 hackathons , and 2 workshop spaces that will host back-to-back workshops given by experts from around the world.

Meet our workshop sponsors:

LEAP-FinalLogo

Leap Ventures
Leap Ventures was founded in 2014 as a venture capital firm specializing in investments in startups. The firm is based in Beirut and is also located in Dubai. It invests in the MENA region with a focus in Lebanon.  It considers investments between $3 million and $7 million and up to $12 million through partnerships with other firms. Leap Ventures closed off its first round at $71 million and is expected a second closing that would most likely increase the fund size to $80 million.

Leap Venture leverage their extensive entrepreneurial experience: engaging with promising entrepreneurs, providing fresh views and strategic opportunities, and planning for transformative growth.

Leap Venture has 4 founding partners with over 70 years of combined experience in founding and exiting companies.  The 4 founding  partners are Henri Asseily, Hala Fadel, Herve Cuvilliez, and Noor Sweid, each with a wealth of experience as investors and entrepreneurs. The 4 have founded and scaled 8 companies leading to over $ 2 billion in exits, and have invested in a total of 47 startups to date.

PrintBooz|Allen|Hamilton:
Booz Allen Hamilton has been at the forefront of strategy and technology for more than 100 years. Today, the firm provides management and technology consulting and engineering services to leading Fortune 500 corporations, governments, and not-for-profits across the globe. In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, Booz Allen builds on six decades of experience partnering with public and private sector clients to solve their most difficult challenges through a combination of business strategy, digital innovation, data analytics, cybersecurity and resilience, operations, supply chain, organization and culture, engineering and life-cycle project management expertise.

As strategy consultants, Booz Allen Hamilton can mentor entrepreneurs and start-ups, particularly through structured programmes organised by accelerators and incubators. Many of their consultants have worked closely with government and multi-nationals and understand what these organisations look for in their suppliers –  therefore, Booz Allen Hamilton can help entrepreneurs ‘speak the right language’ to these entities, who are likely to be their customers.  They have also worked with countries to set up entrepreneur ecosystems and recognise the complexity of the ecosystem that entrepreneurs need to navigate. Their mentorship can help them in this regard and their consultants also have honed skills that entrepreneurs need to develop, particularly in relation to thinking strategically, segmenting customers and building viable financial models.

Booz Allen Hamilton are inspiring innovation and change within the industry. Their objective is to bring innovation at the heart of their people and service offering. Booz Allen Hamilton have ventured into new technologies and instilled a creative and imaginative DNA culture to drive innovation internally within their organisation and externally for their clients.

Idea Stage Workshop: Session #2

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Workshop 2

The second workshop session was kicked off with an intro on gaining user insight about the problem or challenge that each team was assigned as a theme last week.

The teams then spread out throughout the creative venue and were asked to identify the persona of their users– archetypes developed to understand the final user’s needs, wants, and expectations in order to design the best experience for them. The teams then had to draw a customer journey map to tell the story of the customer experience throughout the different stages. Finally, the teams were then asked to come up with up to 10 ideas on methods of how to research their topics through observation, engagement, and immersion.

The workshop is the second of five weekly workshops in series of design thinking workshops offered by SETT, part of the BDL Accelerate Idea Stage Startup competition themed Reimagining Lebanon. 24 participants were selected and assembled into 8 teams of 3 to develop a startup idea to address a problem assigned to them. The participating teams will pitch their ideas to a panel of judges in front of an audience during Banque du Liban Accelerate 2015 for the chance to win 5,000 USD.

Workshop 2

The Lean Startup Methodology

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Conventionally, the first thing every entrepreneur must do is create a business plan that entails a 5 year forecast for income, profits, and cash flow along with the size of an opportunity the service or product that the venture will provide. The belief is that it is possible to figure out the unknowns of a business in advance as well as the calculative risks before you raise money to execute the idea. Once the entrepreneur has developed a solid business plan with minimal risks, they would approach investors to obtain money, and then start developing the product. Thousands of hours would be invested to develop the product and prepare to launch it with very little or no customer feedback. It is only after the product is launched, months or years after development, that the venture would receive substantial customer feedback, and more often than not, learn that the customer does not need or want most of the product’s features.

Startups are not smaller versions of large companies that follow a master plan forecasting complete unknowns. One of the differences is that whilst businesses execute a business model, startups try to create one. Entrepreneurs tend to be visionaries with a stubborn determination to cross any obstacles to see their vision become a success. Successful startups usually go from failure to failure while adapting their features and improving their ideas by learning from customer feedback. This reality has fostered a popular startup methodology, ‘the lean startup’, which dramatically improves the efficiency and speed of these corrections and improvements and minimizes the risk of starting a company. Eric Reis, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who, throughout his career, has experienced success and failure with high-tech startups, developed the lean startup methodology to help startups succeed.

Steve Blank is a successful serial entrepreneur who mentored Eric Reis, and it was his teachings on allowing customers to test product features and provide valuable feedback that resonated with Ries who would use this methodology as a cornerstone of the lean startup movement. Lean manufacturing, a Japanese production philosophy that minimizes inventory throughout the assembly line to avoid any expenditure that does not lead to a goal other than the creation of value for the end customer, inspired the lean startup philosophy.

Similarly to the principles of lean manufacturing, the lean startup philosophy seeks to eliminate inefficient and wasteful practices during the product development stage and to increase practices that add value. This increases the chances of a startup’s success by minimizing the required funding amount, and without requiring business plans or even the perfect product. Customer feedback is essential during the product development phase in the lean startup practice. By releasing a non-finalized minimum viable product, startups can use customer feedback to tailor their product to the specific needs of its customer. The purpose is to assess the specific needs of the consumer and to meet those needs using the least amount of resources possible. Favoring experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition, and iterative design over conventional design development, the lean startup methodology has taken root in the startup world and is now being taught in business schools. The methodology has changed the conventional wisdoms about entrepreneurship, and ventures around the world have been following its principles in an attempt to improve their chances of success.

Below is a brief overview of the lean startup methodology process:the-lean-startup_50291668aa9bb_w15001. Sketch out your hypotheses:
Instead of spending months planning and researching and then writing a lengthy business plan, jot down your hypotheses in a framework called the ‘business model canvas’ (see image below). The business model canvas allows you to look at all 9 building blocks of your business on one page, each component containing a series of hypotheses you need to test.

Sketch-hypotheses2. Listen to Customers
Lean startups use a ‘get out of the building’ approach using ‘customer development’ to test out their hypotheses. In this phase you go out and ask potential users, purchasers, and partners for feedback on all the business model elements. The feedback collected should be on features, pricing, distribution and customer acquisition strategies. Continue repeating this step as the product idea matures.

3. Quick, agile development
This is the stage in the process in which startups create the minimum viable products they test. Instead of traditional production that may last for months, agile development builds the minimum viable product only containing the critical features, in short and repeated cycles through gathering feedback from customers and revising.

In addition to the lean startup methodology being adopted by entrepreneurs around the world, and added to business schools’ curricula, it is being introduced by organizations and startup conferences around the world to thousands of potential entrepreneurs. The learn startup method will be introduced and practiced during workshops at BDL Accelerate 2015 which you can apply to attend.

Design Thinking

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Design Thinking

Design thinking is a methodology employing unique and creative techniques to solve complex problems and find desirable solutions. Traditionally, design thinking was considered as a method only used by designers; however, it is applicable to anything to create innovative ideas as well as to solve problems.

Design thinking is not limited to a specific industry or an area of expertise. Businesses and organizations use the design thinking method to solve existing problems they have and to discover new opportunities. When used effectively, design thinking can drive a brand or business forward. Many large corporations around the world have been adopting design thinking as an approach to innovation to all areas of their businesses. It is through this approach that corporate cultures have been creating innovative cultures. GE, Apple, and Citrix are only a few of the global players to adopt design thinking, and in the region RTA in Dubai has also welcomed design thinking into their corporate culture.

The design thinking process consists of 5 steps:

  1. Empathize: Understand the demographic for whom you are designing and their user experience. This is done through observing, interacting, and immersing yourself in their experiences. Utilize the knowledge as your foundation to begin addressing the challenge.
  1. Define: In this phase, process and synthesize the findings from the first phase to form the blueprint to make the changes that will address the design to impact the user experience.
  1. Ideate: Once you have understood your target, a critical component of design thinking is to brainstorm and explore several different ideas. This phase is all about creativity and fun and a myriad of ideas is encouraged whether savvy, risky, wishful, or dreamy.
  1. Prototype: During the prototype phase, the ideas are transformed into a physical form so that you can experience and interact with them. Ideas may fail at this stage, but it is better to fail early and often in order to succeed.
  1. Test: Testing is an essential part of the process because it provides observations and feedback to refine the prototype. This is when more is learnt about the user and about what does and does not work to modify the prototype and the original point of view developed during the empathy phase.

It is through creating and testing ideas that businesses continue to learn and develop their offerings while being customer centric. At the BDL Accelerate 2015 Reimagine Lebanon workshops, we will be using the design thinking methodology to generate ideas to create relevant solutions for Lebanon. The process will provide and assist the attendees to understand, create, think, and implement their ideas.

Be a Part of BDL Accelerate 2015!

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be a part of

BDL Accelerate 2015 is right around the corner! If you want to get in on the action and be a part of it, now is the time to apply!

Here are the multiple ways you can be a part of BDL Accelerate 2015:

Be a speaker at BDL Accelerate 2015
Our aim is to bring the most relevant, interesting, inspiring, and educational stories to the conference. We’re looking for aspiring leaders whose experiences will impact others. You will have the opportunity to share your experience, insight, failures, successes, and the challenges you faced in order to support and benefit the startup ecosystem.

The 3,000 attendees are entrepreneurs, including 100 startups from around the globe, and 100 VCs, angels, and investors with over US $250 million to deploy. We are seeking talks aimed at all segments of our audience.

If you have a startup experience to share, we encourage you to apply now.

Give a Workshop at BDL Accelerate 2015
During the 2-day international startup conference, 2 spaces will be dedicated solely to hosting a series of third-party workshops. We are looking for experienced people who can provide hands-on workshops relevant to the startup ecosystem that would benefit our 3,000 attendees. Our audience includes entrepreneurs, including 100 startups from around the globe, and 100 VCs, angels, and investors. Topics may range from idea generation, to business funding & development, to marketing and branding, and more.

If you are interested in hosting a workshop, apply here.

Exhibit at BDL Accelerate 2015
Get your product or service noticed by 3,000 entrepreneurs, investors, and professionals from over 30 countries around the world.

Attendees of BDL Accelerate 2015 will see 100 startup exhibitors including international support institutions.

The exhibit pavilions are a key part of our attendees’ BDL Accelerate experience. You will get to display your product or services to enthusiasts, discuss with them, and network with investors and seasoned entrepreneurs. Attendees are encouraged to visit the pavilions throughout the 2-day event. The pavilions are strategically placed in areas that would increase traffic directly to your booth.

For additional information and to apply, click here.