Day 1 of the AIB Start-up Academy: The Lean Business Canvass

The AIB Start-up Academy starts today with Dr Johnny Ryan, executive director of The Innovation Academy at UCD, kicking off proceedings.

He will teach the start-ups about a different kind of business model: the Lean Business Canvass (LBC). The LBC is a way for a company to change what they do.

“There are all sorts of different ways of innovating regarding how to run a business” and “simplicity is the key to innovation”, he says.

Last year, Dr Ryan wrote about the LBC in The Irish Times, calling it "a visual tool for synthesising the entirety of a business's most important moving parts into a simplified blue print that shows all the elements that make the business work, from what it makes, how it distributes, and who it sells to".

Having a simplified picture of a business makes it easier to “explore what would happen to the whole if elements were changed”, he wrote.

He explained how one of his colleagues used the LBC to redefine how his small family beef farm operated, shifting it from a subsistence farm to a luxury goods provider.

The first step, he says, is “trying to take all of the things that make a business work and abstract them away from the day-to-day detail that confuses people and get a single view of what makes it work”.

“Once you get a single view, you can then step back and try to experiment with how the business works.” When entrepreneurs change one element, they must look at what else needs to be changed.

He said it is important for start-ups to be able to do this at an early stage. “Businesses should be able to, if they need to, change and experiment with their business model. It keeps them nimble, makes sure they’re serving a real need the customer has rather than what they think the customer might want.”

Although he started out as a designer and planned to be a 3D animator, Dr Ryan’s field is now innovation and flexible strategic decision-making.

Previously he was the chief innovation officer at The Irish Times, where he established a research and development programme with Science Foundation Ireland and Enterprise Ireland.

Dr Ryan was an associate on the emerging digital environment at the Judge Business School of the University of Cambridge from 2011-14. His PhD at the University of Cambridge, where he was an O’Reilly Foundation Scholar at Magdalene College, examined how terrorist memes proliferate online.

His book, A History of the Internet and the Digital Future, is on the reading list at Harvard, Stanford and other universities.