Using this method, companies can avoid devoting time and energy to ideas that won’t work in the real world, and instead emerge with a viable plan of attack. Its key features are formulating hypotheses about different aspects of the business and “getting out of the building” to probe each hypothesis by interviewing potential clients and consumers and quickly pushing testable prototypes to them.

Based on our research, we also developed evidence-based recommendations for how innovators can overcome the method’s limitations and make the most of it.įirst, a quick primer: The lean approach was devised in the early 2000s.

This suggests unexpected benefits if we get MBAs to embrace the method in the first place. Yet teams with MBA members who started using the components of the method (particularly customer interviews) were more likely (relative to teams without MBA members) to improve the teams’ business ideas. MBAs tended to resist the method at first, we found, likely because their training emphasizes learning by thinking. While educationally diverse teams - those whose members have different kinds of degrees (engineering, medicine, and so forth) - embraced its experimental, learning-by-doing nature, adding people with business degrees to the mix had both positive and negative effects. Further, teams who engaged with the method more intensely had more operational success (that is, established a company and employed more people) in the 18-month period following the I-Corps program.īut there is a catch: The approach doesn’t work equally well for everyone. Using data from the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps program, which uses the lean startup method to help academic scientists and engineers commercialize technologies they’ve developed, we found the approach largely works as promised: It prompts teams to explore hypotheses and converge on ideas. In a recent Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal article, we published the first study to experimentally test the key components of lean startup.

But is lean startup all it’s cracked up to be? Even established companies such as Dropbox, Slack, and General Electric have embraced it as a way to rapidly test and refine ideas for products or businesses. The lean startup approach has taken the entrepreneurship world by storm.

The lean startup sparknotes