Adam Berk is an out-of-the-box thinker, a lean entrepreneur, lean teacher, and serial entrepreneur who helps large organizations implement innovation at scale. He is one of the lucky ones who has found his one thing—that intersection between what one is good at, what one loves (and can be paid for), and what the world needs. His work in that intersection includes mentoring startups in startup programs like Google’s AI for Social Good Accelerator, the World Food Programme Innovation Accelerator, and digitalundivided. He helps grantees and traditional startups with hypothesis testing, customer discovery and design sprints, assumptions mapping and prioritization, strategy, expansion into the US market, adoption of OKRs as they scale, and hiring. He advises the programs themselves, formally or informally, as to their design.

Adam’s journey to this place follows the Startup Program Strategy canvas quite remarkably. After graduating with a degree in Economics from Emory University in 2000, he started in Circle 3—a startup guy. He started neighborrow.com, one of the very first sharing economy companies in the world, with Dave Tomback. Learning many important lessons along the way, the most important of which was to understand deeply “What problem are you solving?” Now in Circle 2, Adam spent time teaching, mentoring, coaching, and empathizing with product teams, embracing a lean startup and design thinkers mentality. This led naturally to Circle 1, the org. Adam broke into corporate innovation consulting when Sonja Kresojevic was putting together a team to work on the Pearson Lean Product Lifecycle. There he took what he knew about lean and agile and gained applicable experience into corporate politics, governance, and how budgets work in the real word. He is dedicated to helping organizations that are raising the standards (both economic and otherwise) for all people around the world.