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. 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.

Even more interesting, large companies like GE are applying them to internal innovation initiatives. There are numerous indicators that the approach is catching on: Business schools and universities are incorporating lean start-up principles into their curricula. In combination with other trends, such as open source software and the democratization of venture financing, it could ignite a new, more entrepreneurial economy. He believes that if it’s widely adopted, it would reduce the incidence of start-up failure. This strategy greatly reduces the chances that start-ups will spend a lot of time and money launching products that no one actually will pay for.īlank, a consulting associate professor at Stanford, is one of the architects of the lean start-up movement and has seen this approach help businesses get off the ground quickly and successfully. They test, revise, and discard hypotheses, continually gathering customer feedback and rapidly iterating on and reengineering their products. Lean start-ups, in contrast, begin by searching for a business model. 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 the people they intended to sell to. In the past few years, a new methodology for launching companies, called “the lean start-up,” has begun to replace the old regimen.

The lean startup book