Research Insight: New Data on Lean Startup

Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)

Stanford eCorner

Business, Life Lessons, Creativity, Startups, Strategy, Thought Leadership, Education, Stanford University, Leadership, Challenges, Journey, Culture, Etl, Innovation, Founders, Stanford, Entrepreneurship

4.5 • 740 Ratings

🗓️ 24 March 2021

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In our first-ever ETL Research bonus episode, we look at one of the first empirical studies of lean startup. In a recent paper published in the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, researchers Michael Leatherbee and Riitta Katila find that lean startup’s emphasis on “customer discovery” — that is, directly testing business hypotheses with potential costumers during product development — does help teams converge on business ideas. They also find that MBAs are both hesitant to embrace the method and especially successful when they choose to employ it. Katila is a professor in Stanford’s Department of Management Science and Engineering and research director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, and Leatherbee is a professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile as well as President of the Advisory Board for Startup Chile. In this conversation they are joined by Stanford adjunct professor Steve Blank, whose Lean Launchpad class and 2003 book The Four Steps to the Epiphany were foundational to the lean startup movement.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Who you are defines how you build.
0:05.7	This is the Entrepreneurial Thought Leader series, brought to you by Stanford Ecorner.
0:12.6	Hi, ETL fans.
0:14.0	I'm ETOP producer Luke Sikora, and today we're excited to be launching something new.
0:18.8	Our first ETL bonus episode focused on the world-class academic research that's happening
0:23.8	at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, the Stanford Center that runs this ETL series.
0:29.4	In these ETL research episodes, we'll distill the most relevant takeaways from
0:33.7	SDVP research for non-academics who are leading organizations, launching ventures, and teaching
0:39.0	and studying entrepreneurship. In this first episode, we're focusing on a new paper about the
0:44.7	Lean Startup Method, co-authored by Stanford Professor and STVP Research Director, Rita
0:49.9	Katila. The paper's full title is The Lean Startup Method, Early Stage Teams, and Hypothesis-based
0:56.2	Probing of Business Ideas, and it appeared in the December 2020 issue of the Strategic Entrepreneurship
1:01.8	Journal. We'll include the link to that paper in the show notes on e-corner. The paper's lead
1:06.7	author is Michael Leatherby, who earned his PhD in Management Science and Engineering at Stanford and studied with STVP, and is now professor at the Pontificia Universidad Catalica de Chile, as well as president of the advisory board for startup Chile.
1:20.9	We were fortunate to also be joined by Steve Blank. Steve's SDVP-sponsored Lean Launchpad class, as well as his 2003 book The Four Steps to
1:29.5	the Epiphany, were hugely influential in both defining and scaling what became known as
1:34.3	Lean Startup.
1:36.4	I kicked off our conversation by asking Steve to talk about how he arrived at the insights
1:41.1	that propelled Lean Startup in the first place.
1:47.3	So, you know, my career before Stanford was as a serial entrepreneur. I did eight startups in 21 years.
1:55.0	But I got lucky enough to retire fairly early in my career and started thinking about the nature of
2:00.2	innovation and entrepreneurship.
	...

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