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Since joining GE Ventures two years ago, Sue Siegel has rapidly made a name for herself. Recently promoted chief executive of GE Ventures, she has become the venture figurehead of GE.
Siegel has worked as both a general partner at venture firm Mohr Davidow Ventures and as president of Affymetrix, the US-biopharmaceutical company which pioneered gene chip technology, during a period in which the company grew from an early stage business to a multi-billion dollar company.
At GE Ventures Siegel has been working at the forefront of bringing the teachings of the lean start-up into a corporate environment. She told Global Corporate Venturing: “GE worked closely with Eric Ries [a pioneer of the lean start up movement] to incorporate lean start-up principles into a new early product ideation and development programme. The principles of minimum viable product, pivoting, incorporating customer voice from the beginning of product ideation, and other lean start-up concepts were developed with a GE flare. They have been applied to hundreds of new early product opportunities. Customers get a very early view of what the product could be, provide feedback, and product development is more robust, providing a product customers want.”
She added: “It is being rolled out in an industrial way at GE and is being celebrated as a way to accelerate the right product through the development process and into customers hands or to fail products very early in their creation, saving the company millions of dollars and allowing precious resource to refocus. This happens with the support of Jeff Immelt [GE’s CEO] and key executive members. There is a strong cultural belief behind this and there are the processes and tools that GE has put in place. The metrics and measures have also been put in place in the last 18 months. This is now being rolled out from the senior executive levels training the top 5,000 leaders and then the next 100,000 which is similar to the Workout and Six Sigma roll out.”