About Leancamp
Lean, Agile and Design processes have revolutionized the software, manufacturing and marketing industries by ensuring that businesses stay connected to the needs of their customers. These techniques allow you to do more with smaller steps, and make sure you’re heading in the right direction, not just taking a big punt on an idea.
What is Leancamp?
Leancamp is an open space (or unconference if you like) – an open, interactive, multi-track event – which brings together the world’s Lean, Agile and Design-led business leaders, and practitioners from different disciplines. It’s a high-energy day focused on learning and knowledge transfer.
Everyone has the power to drive the event’s agenda and to interact with thought-leaders, which makes Leancamp more timely and relevant than traditional conference formats. Everyone brings their knowledge, and the participants drive the topics based on their needs. And not only do speakers present and run workshops, every participant is encouraged to do the same! This environment sparks new tools and partnerships, with a focus on more effective entrepreneurship methods.
How Leancamp started
The first Leancamp was a collaboration between Salim Virani, Nicky Smyth and Saul Albert. Held in London in May, 2010, it quicly sold out at 160 participants. The first Leancamp included such leading lights as David Heinemeier Hansson of 37 Signals, Eric Ries of Lean Startup, Reshma Sohoni of Seedcamp, Dave Gray of XPLANE, and Patrick Van Der Pijl of Business Model Generation. You can read more about it, and see the full line-up here.
The current world of Leancamp
Since then, the Leancamp community has grown around the world, including events in New York, Spain, the Netherlands, Bulgaria and Scotland, and on-going events and workshops in London. It has proven to be a community at the forefront of new innovative spaces. For example, Leancamp initially brought Design Thinking and Lean together, which has predicated the emergence of a Lean UX (User Experience Design) movement. Leancamp also connected Business Model Generation and Visual Thinking, which created a space for a number of canvas-based Lean Startup tools to emerge, and for collaboration between Lean Startup and Business Model Generation thought-leaders.
Leancamp continues to make new connections and create furtive environments for inter-disciplinary innovation, creating a broad ecosystem that’s been joined by the likes of UCL, General Assembly, La Salle, NESTA, Microsoft, Toyota, The Next Web and the European Union. Our outlook is continue with this momentum, engaging more communities with Lean Thinking and Lean Startup as the bridge between them. Moving forward, we hope to foster links with the Intrapreneurship, Communications, Information Analytics & Augmentation, Healthcare and Effectuation communities.
Getting involved
If you’d like to get involved in Leancamp, please contact Salim Virani.
