My Sunday column, “The Rise of the Fleet-Footed Start-Up,” looks at a concept called the “lean start-up.”
Peter DaSilva for The New York Times
Steven Blank teaching at Berkeley. Since 1978, he has been a founder or early investor in eight start-up companies.
The lean start-up model exploits the inexpensive, nimble technologies of open-source software and the Web to accelerate the pace of testing new ideas, finding customers and learning from mistakes, through constant trial and error.
“A start-up,” explains Steven Blank, a lean start-up advocate, “is a temporary organization designed to discover a profitable, scalable business model.”
But there are certainly big-company activities that would fit that description as well. Any business development or strategy team working to come up with a potentially disruptive new product, service or process would qualify.
“If you are in an environment of extreme uncertainty, you are an entrepreneur,” says Eric Ries, who coined the term lean start-up.
The lean start-up process, like every idea in business, is derivative of what has come before. The methodology, for example, includes large ingredients of “rapid prototyping,” a concept popularized a decade ago by Michael Schrage, an innovation researcher and author.
Yet advances in technology keep changing the context, and thus opening doors to new ways of doing things. The lean start-up model is a set of management practices adapted to today’s Web and Internet technologies.
Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management, lists the business benefits of modern Internet technologies as new frontiers in measurement, fast experimentation, sharing information and insights, and the ability to get big fast.
“The technology allows you to do things faster and be much more responsive than in the past,” Mr. Brynjolfsson says. “That’s true for big companies as well as small ones.”