Innovation: Before "Lean Start-ups" there was "Probe and Learn"
At the local entrepreneurship club and the start-up incubators and accelerators the talk is all about Lean Start-ups. The Lean program: Build a minimum viable product, get market validation, pivot, and GO!
Lean Innovation means getting to the market quickly, so it should be cheaper and generate revenue earlier than alternative techniques. Therefore this process is sometimes also called "slow burn" innovation or entrepreneurship. Slow burn means you can delay dealing with venture capitalists ("investment bankers without the conscience") or perhaps avoid them altogether.
I have written about Lean Start-ups and the writings of Eric Ries and Steven G. Blank in my innovation blog servicecocreation.com. I would suggest that anyone interested in innovation and entrepreneurship read Ries's or Blank's blogs or books (links to both are at the end of this article.)
The Lean Start-up principles are also consistent with the entrepreneurial model of effectuation that arose from a qualitative dissertation and further studies by Dr. Saras Sarasvathy.
In his writings Eric Ries describes how web entrepreneurs launch "Lean Startups." He focuses on the need for a new style of management and metrics to conduct careful experiments on "minimum viable products." Bringing radical or discontinuous innovations to market can be described as:
- Build a "minimum viable product" to take to market as a controlled experiment
- Measure results
- Learn
- Iterate with followup experiments
This experimental, iterative process is ideal to bring discontinuous products to the market. The process can be applied by existing firms as well as start-ups. Most examples Ries cites are web-based services or software but he asserts in several articles that the process can be applied elsewhere.
TWENTY years ago...
Gary Lynn published his dissertation in 1993. He had collected data from manufacturers of high-tech business and medical devices that had or were bringing discontinuous new products to market. The processes were vastly different from incremental product innovations that depended on traditional marketing research. He and his co-authors found a process they called Probe and Learn defined as:
- Probe - bring an "immature" product to market as a controlled experiment
- [carefully study the market results]
- Learn
- Iterate with new experiments
Do you feel you have seen the "probe and learn" process before? I certainly do!! In addition, both Probe and Learn and Lean Innovation or Startups also strongly resemble:
- E.W. Deming's change model,
- Agile and/or Extreme Programming, and
- the scientific method...
Earlier work such as von Hippel's research on Customer Active Paradigm of Innovation in the 1970s (and Lead Users), or the even earlier work on rapid prototyping, are consistent with the Lean or probe and learn approaches.
Lean Innovation or Probe and Learn is not just for Internet or Software firms!
It seems fair that Gary Lynn and his co-authors, as well as other earlier researchers get credit for the process that they wrote about and researched, but even more important for our purposes it is useful to note that Lynn found the probe and learn process by studying goods-producers over twenty years ago.
Iterative "Build-Measure-Learn" using "minimum viable products", or iterative "Probe and Learn" using "immature products" are not modern phenomena dependent on the Internet or only for web-based or software firms. Evidence that the process was observed decades ago allows us to generalize the innovation model far beyond the world of internet services and software. Lean Innovation is not just for your local app developer!
For more information on Lean Innovation I recommend:
- 1996 Article (Gary Lynn, et al.): Probe and Learn
- Eric Ries blog
- Lean Startup Book (Eric Ries)
- Steven G. Blank book: Epiphany
- Steven G. Blank blog
- Website: Society for Effectual Action
- Business Model Generation (Book)
Also: Helder Sebastio regularly posts about Lean Start-ups and effectuation on LinkedIn.
An aside: HELP
A plea to my PLN (personal learning network) and online community...
I am creating a new MBA course on product/service innovation. I plan to discuss multiple approaches to innovation, including:
- Lean Innovation (Blank and Ries),
- Design Thinking,
- Open Innovation and crowdsourcing, and
- Traditional staged product innovation.
I welcome suggestions on topics, projects, cases and readings to make this course rock! Suggestions??
#Innovation #LeanInnovation
Business & Carrier Strategist | Innovation, Creativity and Agile | Creative Mentor
1yGood article! I´d just like to emphasize the (not so obvious) fact that, innovation endeavors, either lean, agile or you name it, before any other thing, they are LEARNING JOURNEYS.
Management Consulting/Contracts Management/Analytics Translator
9yWhat I find most interesting about this discussion is that I find I have to dissect all that is being said from two perspectives. Having founded three start-up businesses using lean/slow-burn methods I find the assumption this is a new concept with the explosion of the internet amusing. Perhaps it's human nature to assume no one knew it till we wrote it down. Secondly, I see the usefulness to define and clarify a process, yet motivation to innovate cannot be taught in the classroom. You can teach marketing and management students to recognize the process, yet by the time a company can afford their services that phase has matured beyond the scope of lean/slow-burn. I am still not convinced you can teach entrepreneurship or innovation in the classroom. There are human elements that cannot be taught that will determine the success or failure of any start-up. As much as my intellect would like me to think I can teach someone else how to be a success, experience has taught me that I can't teach someone else how to be human.
Professeure agrégée, Marketing Numérique - ESG UQAM - Digital Marketing Associate Professor
9yThanks Gary. I knew the agile approach well more from a user experience pespective, and your post helps tie the knots with P/S innovation as a whole. For your new MBA course, this 2008 article might be interesting for you. Though a bit outdated, it helps to raise challenging issues regarding the trade offs of crowdsourcing user research. http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~echi/papers/2008-CHI2008/2008-02-mech-turk-online-experiments-chi1049-kittur.pdf
Associate Professor of Marketing at Virginia Commonwealth University
9yGary - Nice summary and blend of new and old concepts. I look forward to hearing about your course experience. Order of content will be important. I used a project approach for a similar MBA elective. Methods and content that works well in our Master of Product Innovation program did not resonate with MBA students. Having a class from business, engineering, and arts backgrounds, committed to innovation and embracing design thinking, makes a big difference. Hope we can discuss this at the next VCU Innovation Summit.
Tech Strategist & Innovation Consultant • Advisory Board Member • Mentor for Deep Tech Companies: Bridging tech & business to drive innovation
9yGreat plan and discussion of multiple approaches to innovation. In the age of the customer corporations need to create and foster intrapreneurial values and behaviour across the whole organization. I find it interesting to include a discussion on how corporations become more intrapreneurial and how corporations learn to be more productive with fewer resources. What's the role of tech in collaboration and innovation across corporations, startups and communities?