Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything

Launching a new enterprise–whether it’s a tech start-up, a small business, or an initiative within a large corporation–has always been a hit-or-miss proposition. According to the decades-old formula, you write a business plan, pitch it to investors, assemble a team, introduce a product, and start selling as hard as you can. And somewhere in this sequence of events, you’ll probably suffer a fatal setback. The odds are not with you: As new research by Harvard Business School’s Shikhar Ghosh shows, 75% of all start-ups fail.

But recently an important countervailing force has emerged, one that can make the process of starting a company less risky. It’s a methodology called the "lean start-up," and it favors experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition, and iterative design over traditional "big design up front" development. Although the methodology is just a few years old, its concepts–such as "minimum viable product" and "pivoting"–have quickly taken root in the start-up world, and business schools have already begun adapting their curricula to teach them.

by Steve Blank

Full Story: http://hbr.org/2013/05/why-the-lean-start-up-changes-everything

(Many thanks to Cameron Lawrence Poe Family Faculty Fellow at
The University of Montana
http://www.business.umt.edu/FacultyStaff/CameronLawrence.aspx for sharing this.)