Lean

Nguyễn Đặng Tuấn Minh

In 2025, KisStartup reaches the milestone of 10 years accompanying Vietnam’s innovation ecosystem. Ten years may not be long in history, but it is enough for us to witness the maturity of a new generation of entrepreneurs—those who dare to try, dare to fail, dare to learn, and dare to start again. Along this journey, we discovered a simple truth: entrepreneurship does not begin with capital—it begins with the capacity to learn.

That is why, as we look back and prepare for a new decade, KisStartup has chosen to invest in the learning capacity of the community by building NEXA15—an online learning platform that is not just a library of courses but a Lean Learning Platform, where each lesson is a Build–Measure–Learn cycle designed for learners to immediately apply in real life.

Why We Choose the Lean Path in Learning

Lean Startup teaches us that every idea only becomes valuable when tested through action. After 10 years of working with thousands of entrepreneurs, we realized that most early failures do not stem from a lack of ideas or capital—but from a lack of the right learning method.

Learners—like entrepreneurs—often fall into three traps:

1. Accumulating knowledge without taking action,
2. Acting without measuring,
3. Measuring without learning.

We aim to break those three traps. NEXA15 is designed so that every module does not end at “understanding,” but requires learners to try, measure, and learn again.

Each lesson is a small experiment—where you cannot just watch a video; you must apply and record your feedback. That is “Lean in learning”: learn just enough, act immediately, fail small, and improve fast.

Lean Learning for Everyone – Not Just Startups

Lean thinking is not limited to technology or early-stage founders. It is a way of thinking and acting in a constantly changing world.

• For students, Lean helps you self-discover, self-reflect, and find your own path.
• For SMEs, Lean helps you validate business ideas quickly, reduce investment risks, and accelerate digital transformation.
• For educators and startup support organizations, Lean provides a structured way to design training, incubation, and coaching programs grounded in real-world feedback.
• For policymakers and managers, Lean offers a way to observe societal change—not through thick reports, but through evidence gathered from the field.

Thus, NEXA15 is not “a course”—it is a practical knowledge platform designed for anyone to learn and build in their own way.

Why NEXA15 Was Created – Making Learning and Knowledge Sharing Lean

Throughout our journey, KisStartup has designed hundreds of training programs and accompanied startup teams across Vietnam. We noticed a common issue: knowledge is passed on in short workshops, but there is rarely a mechanism to help learners maintain long-term habits of learning and applying.

NEXA15 was created to fill exactly that gap.

Named after NEXA—short for Next Action, Next Learning, Next Impact—and “15” representing 15 minutes of daily learning and practice, the platform is built on three principles:

1. Learn to act, not learn to know – every course includes an Action Task tied to the learner’s real-life context.
2. Lean and measurable – short duration, focused content, and built-in progress assessment.
3. Continuously updated and co-created – content developed from the reality of Vietnamese businesses, refined through feedback from learners and mentors.

In 2025, marking our 10-year journey, we launched a series of 10 Lean courses on Thinkific—distilled from thousands of hours of teaching, research, consulting, and hands-on work.

The 10 Lean Courses on NEXA15
1. Innovation-driven Entrepreneurship – Basic & Advanced

→ Provides frameworks and tools to identify, validate, and scale business models.

2. Digital Transformation for Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises

→ Helps SMEs understand, select, and apply digital technologies effectively and inclusively.

3. Startup Ecosystems and Global Support Models

→ Analyzes the roles of stakeholders, investors, support organizations, governments, and businesses in fostering innovation.

4. Impact Businesses & Impact Innovation

→ Guides entrepreneurs in measuring impact and building sustainable business models balancing social, environmental, and economic goals.

5. Intellectual Property in Startups

→ Helps founders understand and leverage IP as a strategic asset.

6. Entrepreneurship Based on Cultural Heritage (Basic)

→ Shows how to combine cultural value with business thinking to create unique creative products.

7. AI for Innovation – Basic & Advanced

→ Enables startups to use AI for market research, product design, and business model optimization.

8. ESG for Businesses

→ Introduces practical standards, tools, and roadmaps for SMEs to adopt ESG.

9. Data Asset Management for SMEs

→ Guides businesses in building data strategies and protecting digital assets.

10. Lean Thinking for Founders

→ Synthesizes Lean Startup, Design Thinking, Effectuation, and AI-driven Innovation—the foundation of all KisStartup programs.

Lean Learning to Create Sustainable Value

Each NEXA15 course is not just a lecture, but a real story—drawn from ten years of working alongside Vietnamese businesses, especially founders who have experienced both success and failure.

We believe that knowledge becomes meaningful only when validated through experience, and experience becomes valuable only when given time for reflection.

That’s why every course integrates three components:

• Real case studies from KisStartup’s projects,
• Short action exercises for immediate application,
• Feedback and mentoring mechanisms to help learners not just “learn once,” but learn for life.

From Community – Toward Sustainable Creative Value

Over the past decade, KisStartup has been fortunate to learn from many inspiring people—passionate young founders, persistent innovators, dedicated support organizations, and investors who believe in Vietnam’s potential. They are the reason NEXA15 exists: so this community can keep learning together, sharing with one another, and continuing to grow.

Our 10-year anniversary is not the end of a journey, but the beginning of a new decade—where we look ahead to building a global learning community:

• where Vietnamese students can learn and connect with international founders,
• where mentors can share knowledge across borders,
• where every small idea can become a seed for big change.

We call this “From community—spreading into sustainable creative value.”

Looking Toward the Next Decade – Keep Learning, Keep Creating

In today’s turbulent world, entrepreneurship is not just for the young. It is the spirit of trying, relearning, and reinventing—at any age, in any field. As KisStartup enters its second decade, we hold this belief:

“The entrepreneur of the future is not the one who knows the most, but the one who learns the fastest.”

With NEXA15, we hope to offer that opportunity—to learn lean, experiment small, and generate meaningful impact.

For the past ten years, we have learned through failures.
For the next ten, we hope to learn with you—through action.

KisStartup – 10 Years of Learning, Experimenting, and Spreading Innovation.
From community – to sustainable creative value.

© Copyright belongs to KisStartup. Any form of reproduction, quotation, or reuse must credit KisStartup as the source.

When people talk about Lean Startup, most imagine small, agile teams, rough products, and limited budgets. But a decade of practice has shown: Lean was never meant only for startups. Lean is a learning management mindset in uncertainty — and “uncertainty” is precisely the constant state of large enterprises facing digital transformation, green transition, and supply chain shifts.

Therefore, Lean enters large organizations not through “startup slogans,” but through cycles of fast learning – disciplined decision-making – and evidence-based scaling.

In this article, I share how traditional enterprises can apply Lean to refresh their solution portfolios, test ideas quickly in real markets, and build a culture of innovation — and outline how KisStartup has partnered with corporations through a “venture client + mentoring” model, including programs with Mitsui Chemicals, Hồ Gươm Group, and other partners.

Lean in Large Organizations: Why It’s Different – and Must Be Different

Startups lack resources so they must learn fast. Corporations have abundant resources but often lack the urgency to learn. The difference lies in accountability structure: every decision affects multiple departments, processes are complex, and reputational risks are high.

That’s why Lean in corporations cannot simply mean “creating an innovation team and assigning them KPI on ideas.” It requires a new architecture:

• Enterprise-level hypotheses: Instead of “Will anyone use this feature?”, the question becomes “Which new growth path has evidence strong enough to justify investment?”
• Safe-to-try domains: Protected spaces where teams can run Build–Measure–Learn cycles without disrupting core operations.
• Innovation accounting: A learning dashboard that ties experiments to financial decision gates.

Without these three pillars, “doing Lean” often becomes internal PR rather than real change.

From Corporate Problems to Real-Market Experiments

Large organizations often start from solutions (buying software, setting up R&D centers), while Lean starts from problems.

Our first step with corporate clients is always to define the problem as a testable hypothesis: identify affected users (internal or external), current behaviors, opportunity costs, and expected market signals if the hypothesis is correct.

Then, project teams must meet real customers — B2B or internal users — to turn the problem into a Meaningful MVP: a value message, a minimal process, or a “good enough to learn” service package.

In corporations, MVPs are not always software; many are trial services, semi-finished products, channel experiments, pricing policies, or new operational configurations. Lean broadens the definition of “product” — and therefore opens the door to new business models.

Case Studies

Mitsui Chemicals: Reverse Pitch & Pre-Investment Evidence

Within the framework of open innovation collaboration, our teams worked with the partner to co-design market–technology problem statements around smart materials, sustainability, chain traceability, and data applications. A typical process includes clarifying downstream value assumptions (who pays, and for what value), building an MVP that is Meaningful–Valuable–Practical, running small pilots with B2B customers in Vietnam or within the regional network, and finally consolidating innovation accounting for the technical–business council to decide whether to “scale or stop.”
What matters most is not whether a single experiment succeeds, but how fast credible evidence is created to support financial decisions.

Venture client model: the corporation presents a real, market-anchored “open problem” (reverse pitch); KisStartup searches, screens, and matches suitable startups/technology teams.

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Ho Guom Group: How a Large Enterprise Applies Lean Startup in Its Own Operations

Ho Guom Group offers an illustrative example of how a large enterprise can adopt the Lean Startup mindset—not only to optimize processes but also to learn quickly and improve continuously.

Through the “bridge” created by the VNU Center for Knowledge Transfer and Start-up Support (VNU-CSK) and KisStartup, the Vietnamese partner of the LIF Global Program, Ho Guom Group opened its real operational challenges to external experts, inviting scientists to jointly “work the problem” using a Lean approach: start from a concrete issue, identify feasible solutions, run small, safe-to-fail experiments, measure results, then adjust.

From this series of exchanges, nine innovators collaborated to discuss, analyze root causes, and propose solutions that could be trialed quickly and at low cost. Notable suggestions included installing sensors to detect overload points on the production line to flag congestion early, and introducing an internal barcode system to trace and measure each product’s path during manufacturing.

Ho Guom Group representatives appreciated this “lean” approach, noting that the proposed ideas were practical, testable, and ready for immediate piloting—well aligned with the group’s ongoing digital transformation and process optimization journey.

From a Lean Startup perspective, this was not merely a “technology consulting session,” but a complete learning loop—a moment where a large enterprise actively practiced an “open” culture, learned from small errors, and gradually embedded innovation into everyday operations.

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Other Programs: From Digital Transformation to Green Export

Across KisStartup’s different program components (inclusive digital transformation, green-export business model innovation, and institute–industry technology linkage), Lean serves as the learning contract: businesses commit to 2–3 real experiments, at least one shared leading indicator (e.g., “7-day return-customer rate,” “cost-to-serve per order”), a learning log after each cycle, and paired mentors to resolve “people bottlenecks.”
Once data begins to flow, AI and digital platforms finally start to unlock their true value.

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Mentoring Inside the Enterprise: Not a Trend, but the Soft Infrastructure of Lean

Many global corporations treat mentoring as an organizational advantage: it shortens learning curves, improves retention, and creates safe feedback loops for experimentation. In Vietnam, embedding mentoring inside enterprises is even more essential because our culture tends to avoid failure—while Lean requires failing the right way.

When designing mentoring programs, we avoid “symbolic” activities. The most effective method is to connect mentors directly with the pilot sprint:

• Internal mentors (process, legal, finance) ensure experiments do not break the system or stall due to procedures.

• External mentors (entrepreneurs, technologists, investors) help teams speak the language of the market and see risks/opportunities beyond industry habits.

• Each mentor–mentee pair signs a simple learning contract: what critical assumption this round tests; what evidence is needed; and what threshold triggers a decision.

When mentoring is tied to real problems and real data, it becomes a mechanism that protects a learning culture: people are encouraged to ask questions, face feedback, and have support when making difficult decisions.

“Enterprise MVP”: Test Small – Measure Fast – Decide Clearly

The MVP concept inside a corporation is different from that of a startup. At corporate scale, “minimum” does not mean “cheapest,” but “just enough to learn with acceptable risk.”
Common and effective forms include:

• Channel MVP: deploy in one product line, one region, or one time slot to read demand/profit signals before scaling.

• Add-on service MVP: layer a “thin” service (express delivery, maintenance bundle, personalized consultation) to test willingness to pay.

• Semi-finished/data MVP: when the market shows demand for components (modules, materials, data feeds), redefine the product—many firms discover new revenue streams this way.

• Process MVP: alter a single step (authentication, approval, shift assignment) to quantify cost–experience impact.

The core is always innovation accounting: each MVP is tied to one assumption, one leading metric, one go/no-go threshold. Without a learning dashboard, an MVP becomes just “testing for the sake of testing.”

From Product Innovation to Cultural Innovation

Many companies think innovation means launching new products. The more durable innovation is cultural: shifting from “right/wrong by hierarchy” to “right/wrong by evidence”; from “beautiful reports” to “clear lessons”; from “KPI must win” to “disciplined learning.”

Examples include:

• Monday Learning Hour: each unit shares one evidence-based insight from customers/partners.

• Thursday Experiment Block: 4 hours dedicated to micro-tests with basic measurement and a sponsor.

• Friday Reflection: What did we learn? What surprised us? What is the one thing we will change next week?

These routines are cheaper than any “innovation mindset workshop,” yet they build the organizational habit of learning—essential for Lean to endure.

People Before Technology: A Repeated Lesson from Pilots

In many consulting cases, companies begin with the expectation that AI will forecast or personalize. Our answer is always the same: yes—but only after data, and data only after people.
Start with a data MVP (single source of truth, defined indicators, learning logs) plus behavioral mentoring (daring to ask, test, and show failure). Once the data muscles and cultural muscles form, any technology becomes effective.

At a municipal service corporation, the indicator “combined-service utilization rate” became the leading metric for restructuring customer experience. By testing in only two sites and one time block, the intrapreneur team demonstrated a double-digit weekly uplift; that small piece of evidence unlocked the budget for full-scale rollout.

The 90–180 Day Roadmap: A Lean Playbook for Enterprises

• Weeks 0–2: Frame the problem as a testable assumption. One page: who, what pain, current behaviors, opportunity cost, expected signal. Select one leading indicator.

• Weeks 3–6: Build the MVP (Meaningful–Valuable–Practical). Test small, safely, with clear measurement and branching rules. Assign internal/external mentors.

• Weeks 7–12: Run 2–3 Build–Measure–Learn cycles. Each ends with a one-page learning memo; decisions are made based on evidence.

• Months 4–6: Standardize innovation accounting + scale. Turn small wins into playbooks; turn informed failures into a learning library. Build the mentor network and operationalize the three cultural rituals.

Do it right, and the enterprise gains not only better products/pilots, but a team that knows how to learn—the most valuable capability in uncertainty.

Lean as a Learning Contract Between Strategy and People

When Lean meets a large organization, the fastest change is not technology, but decision-making:
from “I think” to “the data shows”;
from “who wins the argument” to “which evidence wins.”

Innovation stops being an event and becomes the weekly rhythm of the organization.

KisStartup believes in a simple but powerful formula: a well-defined open problem + meaningful MVP + shoulder-to-shoulder mentoring + disciplined innovation accounting. With Mitsui Chemicals, Ho Guom Group, and many other partners, this disciplined cycle reduces investment risk, accelerates market entry, and—most importantly—builds a learning culture where innovation is not a project, but an organizational capability.

Lean began as a startup method. In large enterprises, Lean becomes a learning contract between strategy and people. And when that contract is written in evidence, the organization will always find the right answer—even when the world changes the question every day.

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