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Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything

2013; Harvard Business Publishing; Volume: 91; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

0017-8012

Steve Blank,

Entrepreneurship Studies and Influences

In past few years, a new methodology for launching companies, called the lean start-up, has begun to replace old regimen. Traditionally, a venture's founders would write a business plan, complete with a five-year forecast, use it to raise money, and then go into stealth mode to develop their offerings, all without getting much feedback from people they intended to sell to. Lean start-ups, in contrast, begin by searching for a business model. They test, revise, and discard hypotheses, continually gathering customer feedback and rapidly iterating on and reengineering their products. This strategy greatly reduces chances that start-ups will spend a lot of time and money launching products that no one actually will pay for. Blank, a consulting associate professor at Stanford, is one of architects of lean start-up movement and has seen this approach help businesses get off ground quickly and successfully. He believes that if it's widely adopted, it would reduce incidence of start-up failure. In combination with other trends, such as open source software and democratization of venture financing, it could ignite a new, more entrepreneurial economy. There are numerous indicators that approach is catching on: Business schools and universities are incorporating lean start-up principles into their curricula. Even more interesting, large companies like GE are applying them to internal innovation initiatives. INSET: Idea in Brief.