Innovation: have you thought about the Lean Startup approach?

No business model survives the first contact with the customer”, said Steve Blank, father of Customer Development and Professor at Stanford

Maximise learning and minimise expenditure

Inspired by the principles of Lean Management, which appeared at the end of the 1980s in the Japanese automobile industry, Lean Startup is based on two levers of action: go quickly (but without rushing) and go to the essentials by focusing above all on what works (Minimum Viable Product).

The Lean Startup approach is based on the premise that entrepreneurs lack a real insight into the needs and profile of their future customers. There is therefore a great risk of exhausting resources by creating a product that does not meet market expectations. To alleviate this problem, the Lean Startup methodology advocates the idea of validating an offer very quickly, and at a lower cost, with potential customers by confirming or invalidating a maximum number of hypotheses, thus making it possible, through an iterative process, to redefine the offer until it finds its “product-market fit”.

The Lean Startup approach is based on 4 main principles:

Create an MVP: this involves developing a prototype that is initially very basic and then becomesincreasingly sophisticated. The term MVP (minimum viable product) “emphasises that the prototype should be as basic as possible – in order to avoid unnecessary costs – while remaining viable, i.e. its supposed benefits should be clearly visible to the user[1]”.
Collect quantitative data on the use of the prototype including qualitative feedback: depending on the results obtained, it may be necessary to make a “pivot”, i.e. a change of trajectory in order to meet market expectations. This new direction would then correspond to a new hypothesis that would have to be tested by a new MVP.
Learning: learning takes place through a rapid succession of iterations in which the potential customer occupies a central position. In general, this experience that results in the acquisition of a good insight into the customer’s needs.
Managing resources: this involves minimising costs throughout the iterative process.

As you can see, the acquisition of real experience is central to the Lean Startup methodology, because it is thanks to this that the adoption or non-adoption of the new product is observed and new directions can be identified.

Lean Startup, for large companies in search of agility

Today, more and more large companies are adopting the Lean Startup methodology, whether to equip innovation teams with methods or to support product managers in understanding customer needs. Internal incubators are also part of this extension, as they enable the transition from prototype to product and keep the entrepreneurial culture alive and sustainable within the company.

The current craze for Lean Startup reflects the parameters of this emerging innovation culture: focusing primarily on the user’s experience rather than on products, questioning the need, using trial and error, openness to the unknown and tolerance of failure.

Here are a few quick tips for implementing this approach: adopt an experimental approach, establish Build-Measure-Learn cycles, interact with real users, create small multidisciplinary teams.

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