Entrepreneurship: Why the Lean Startup Changes Everything
HBR.ORG
Spotlight on ENTREPRENEURSHIP
May 2013 reprinT R1305C
Why the Lean
Start-Up Changes
Everything
by Steve Blank
Spotlight on ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Spotlight
For article reprints call 800-988-0886 or 617-783-7500, or visit hbr.org
Artwork Sara Hughes, Download, 2005
Acrylic on linen, 1.5 m x 1.5 m
Wallace Trust Collection
Steve Blank is a consulting associate professor at
Stanford University and a lecturer and National
Science Foundation principal investigator at the University of California at Berkeley and
Columbia University. He has participated in eight high-tech start-ups as either a cofounder or an early employee. Why the
Lean
Start-Up
Changes
Everything by Steve Blank
May 2013 Harvard Business Review 3
Spotlight on ENTREPRENEURSHIP
L
aunching 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.
The lean start-up movement hasn’t gone totally
mainstream,
Spotlight on ENTREPRENEURSHIP
May 2013 reprinT R1305C
Why the Lean
Start-Up Changes
Everything
by Steve Blank
Spotlight on ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Spotlight
For article reprints call 800-988-0886 or 617-783-7500, or visit hbr.org
Artwork Sara Hughes, Download, 2005
Acrylic on linen, 1.5 m x 1.5 m
Wallace Trust Collection
Steve Blank is a consulting associate professor at
Stanford University and a lecturer and National
Science Foundation principal investigator at the University of California at Berkeley and
Columbia University. He has participated in eight high-tech start-ups as either a cofounder or an early employee. Why the
Lean
Start-Up
Changes
Everything by Steve Blank
May 2013 Harvard Business Review 3
Spotlight on ENTREPRENEURSHIP
L
aunching 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.
The lean start-up movement hasn’t gone totally
mainstream,