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 favours 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 ... READ MORE

Released by Harvard Business Review May 2013