Valuable ventures create visionaries

Valuable ventures create visionaries

“You are not a visionary… yet.” Brant Cooper

Last week, MaRS took advantage of a very special opportunity to welcome author Brant Cooper to speak at the last Lived It Lecture of the 2012-2013 Entrepreneurship 101 series.

Following the success of his first book, The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development, which sold 20,000 copies, Brant is scheduled to release his second book, The Lean Entrepreneur, on February 26.

The Lean Entrepreneur aims to inspire the entrepreneur in everyone, and Brant brought some key themes from the book to life for the MaRS audience.

Being lean means focusing on value-added activities

Being “lean” does not mean being cheap. It is a way to create value and eliminate waste by focusing on value-added activities and eliminating non-value-added activities—what Brant calls your value stream.

Brant expressed how to be a successful lean entrepreneur and visionary through validated learning and explained how to achieve this by customer interaction, viability tests of your product and iteration.

He also presented a seven-step startup model and discussed different types of businesses and where they fall within the innovation spectrum.

This lecture took traditional thought on what defines a visionary and flipped it on its head. Brant claimed that being a visionary is not about foreseeing the future, but is about relentlessly pursuing change through value creation.

Learn more about what it means to be a visionary by watching Brant’s lecture followed by an audience Q-and-A session here.

Credit: Produced by MaRS Media.

If you are interested in viewing the lecture on distribution, which was removed from this year’s schedule, you can find resources in the Distribution section of the Entrepreneur’s Toolkit.

Next lecture: Meet the Entrepreneurs – Information Technology, Communications and Entertainment on Wednesday, February 27, 2013.

Resources: 

Check out the two new workbooks in the Entrepreneur’s Toolkit:

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