A642.8.3.RB – How dangerous are Lean Start-ups?
According to Heimans and Timms (2014), organizations that are traditional and want to harness their competency to new power must 1) evaluate their status in the environment of shifting power, 2) channel their most brutal pundit, and 3) cultivate their capacity to mobilize. Our brains are phenomenal storage for data and system retrieval that lean towards repetition and patterns. Original new ideas originate from paradigms that are crossing by accident where the capacity of our self-organizing brains goes to work in a peculiar unification or merging that tirelessly try to make sense of an unprecedented combination.
The ground for success is based on different components for one strategy to ensure that all business start-ups would succeed. Utilizing a lean method start up would result in lesser failures rather than traditional methodologies. The lean start-up methodology shows or teaches us how to drive, steer, and turn new business start-ups, telling us when to grow and persevere to succeed with expediency. We can say that much of start-ups is generated with a new idea thinking it is what the general public wants. Business innovators spend the time to research developing and perfecting the “idea” without producing the actual idea or product in any form. Unfortunately, some companies neglect to survey their targeted group to determine whether their new idea or product is interesting or beneficial to them which ultimately is the primary cause of start-up failure.
Disruption and innovation often correspond as both creators and accelerators. But can distinctively be differentiated as disruptors can be derived as innovators. Innovators, on the other hand, cannot and will not always be assumed as disruptors. Disruption extracts and modifies the way we behave, learn, operates our business and think on a daily basis. For an innovation to be disruptive, it must displace a subsisting low-end market or industry producing something new and turning non-customers into profitable customers.
According to Mountz (2012), the management theorists focus on the offering when discussing disruptive innovation. The premise is that consumers gravitate toward an outstanding product or idea regardless if the product is good enough in comparison with other sophisticated idea or innovation. For aspiring disrupters, creating and designing new idea that will benefit targeted users is just their first steps. Delivering a breakthrough determinations require industry-defying strategy in doing business and extraordinary dedication and commitment ensuring that targeted groups gain the benefits.
Blank (2012) indicated that the lean method has three primary principles. First, instead of engaging in planning and research that takes months, they write sophisticated business plan where the framework hypothesis is summarized called business model canvas. Second, lean start-ups use customer development approach for testing their hypothesis. Innovators approach potential customers, buyers, and stakeholders to get their feedback on every element about the product such as features, distribution channels, and pricing. The focus is on the immediacy of soliciting the customer’s feedback and use those feedback to revise their assumptions, testing and redesigning the product to meet the consumers’ needs and expectations. And third, lean start-ups practices agile development. Customer development and agile development works cohesively. Agile development prevents wasted time and resources by generating product incrementally and iteratively.
The start-ups that operated in a “stealth mode” during the dot-com boom where the prototypes were only introduced to the “beta” group to eliminate alerting potential competitors in the marketplace. Such methodology is now considered obsolete with the existence of the lean start-up methodology. The primary element in the success of a lean start-up is transparency and solicitation of honest feedbacks from the consumers.
Well established industry giants can combat lean start-up disrupters by eliminating uncertainties. Instead of abandoning processes that failed, using lean start-up approach enables organizations to develop order instead of havoc by supplying organizations tools to test their vision continuously. Lean is all about a methodology towards product development.
Any organization should work smarter rather than work harder for their lean start-ups to be successful. Start-ups are experimentations and managers should have the clarity to respond if the new product should be built and if the sustainable business can be constructed around the product. When managers enlist early product adopters or users and involving employees to move forward with the experiment or replication, building a new product will eventually occur. When the company is ready to introduce or launch the product to the public, the product launching will be successful since the company has already established the product’s users or customers.
In a lean start-up, innovation is not about enforcing the innovative idea, but it is about the search for ways to change some facets of the idea into a product that users are willing to pay. Heimans & Timms (2004) stated that permanent transparency now replaces the notions of traditional secrecy. We will continue to get better in generating new ideas when we continuously gain support and endorsement from our leaders, stakeholders, customers, and the community. The bottom line here is that no matter how convincing or significant the original idea is, it is substantially different from an existing one and organizations need to grow organically, organizing their efforts around the differences.
References
Blank, S. (2013). Why the lean start-up changes everything. Harvard Business Review.
Heimans, J., & Timms, H. (2014). Understanding new power. Harvard Business Review.
Mountz, M. (2012). Kiva the disrupter. Harvard Business Review.
Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2012/12/kiva-the-disrupter
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