Dear colleagues,
Are you conducting research into the strategy of innovation, with explicit advice for business managers and entrepreneurs? Does it intersect - or contradict - the principles of the Lean Startup Method? Are you going to the Academy of Management's annual conference in Chicago in August?
The Lean Startup Method (Ries, 2011) prompts entrepreneurs to explore a new business idea by declaring vital assumptions as hypotheses, perhaps using the Business Model Canvas (Osterwalder & Pigneur, 2010) . Instead of recording these in a voluminous business plan, Ries and collaborator Steve Blank (2013) recommend that entrepreneurs "get out of the building" to discover customer demand through conversations, experiments, and minimum viable products. Eric Ries's new book, the Startup Way (2017) , adapts this method as the foundation of both strategy design and strategy implementation at larger companies, advocating for rigorous management of "innovation portfolios" and, indeed, major reform of organizational structures to encourage accountability and faster, more efficient progress in innovation.
These ideas have become immensely popular in contemporary entrepreneurial education, perhaps because they are well-articulated and packaged for business practitioners instead of academic audiences. Yet, they rely on - or at least replicate - many existing theories in strategy and entrepreneurship. A brief and woefully incomplete list would certainly include dynamic capabilities (Eisenhardt & Martin, 2000; D. Teece & Leih, 2016; D. J. Teece, Pisano, & Shuen, 1997) , discover-driven planning (McGrath, 2010; McGrath & MacMillan, 1995) , the literature on business models (Casadesus-Masanell & Ricart, 2010; Zott, Amit, & Massa, 2011) , and even the wide-ranging conversations about disruptive innovation (Christensen & Bower, 1996; Christensen, Raynor, & McDonald, 2015) .
One of our potential roles in academia is to inform – and if necessary contradict – these practitioner-oriented tools with our accumulated wisdom. Can we help Mr. Ries, Blank, and Osterwalder improve these methods based on empirical evidence? Might we help practitioners better understand if and when these approaches generate the expected results, and when they do not?
Andy Wu (Harvard) and David Clough (University of British Columbia) are organizing a third iteration of their very popular Lean Startup Professional Development Workshop (PDW) at AOM in August 2018 to motivate high-level thinking on the topic. To accompany this and to further continue the conversation on the Lean Startup phenomenon, I am also organizing a companion Panel Symposium to invite a larger volume of shorter conversations (no slides, no author citations in the program) with the express aim of motivating research on the Lean Startup Method. Each scholar with an ambition to conduct future research in the topic will be invited to speak for a few minutes, in order to inform the aggregate research agenda, hear quick ideas to improve the research question, and find potential collaborators. If AOM accepts this symposium, I will re-issue this request in July, 2018 to bring in more ideas and research questions.
If you are interested in Creating A Research Agenda for the Lean Startup Method at AOM, please complete this short online form with your name, institution, and specific research question(s). I will use this in the proposal to AOM, and to organize the conversations during the session.
Sincerely,
Ted Ladd PhD
Professor of Entrepreneurship and Research Fellow at Hult International Business School
Instructor at Harvard University
ted@tedladd.com
References
Blank, S. (2013). Why the lean start-up changes everything. Harvard Business Review, 91(5), 63-72.
Casadesus-Masanell, R., & Ricart, J. E. (2010). From strategy to business models and onto tactics. Long range planning, 43(2), 195-215.
Christensen, C. M., & Bower, J. (1996). Customer power, strategic investment, and the failure of leading firms. Strategic Management Journal, 17(3), 197-218.
Christensen, C. M., Raynor, M. E., & McDonald, R. (2015). Disruptive innovation. Harvard Business Review, 93(12), 44-53.
Eisenhardt, K. M., & Martin, J. A. (2000). Dynamic capabilities: what are they? Strategic Management Journal, 21(10-11), 1105-1121.
McGrath, R. G. (2010). Business models: A discovery driven approach. Long range planning, 43(2), 247-261.
McGrath, R. G., & MacMillan, I. C. (1995). Discovery driven planning: Wharton School, Snider Entrepreneurial Center.
Osterwalder, A., & Pigneur, Y. (2010). Business model generation: a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers: Wiley.
Ries, E. (2011). The Lean Startup: How today's entrepreneurs use continuous innovation to create radically successful businesses: Random House Digital, Inc.
Ries, E. (2017). The startup way: Making entrepreneurship a fundamental discipline of every enterprise: Crown Business.
Teece, D., & Leih, S. (2016). Uncertainty, Innovation, and Dynamic Capabilities. California Management Review, 58(4), 5-12.
Teece, D. J., Pisano, G., & Shuen, A. (1997). Dynamic capabilities and strategic management.
Zott, C., Amit, R., & Massa, L. (2011). The business model: recent developments and future research. Journal of management, 37(4), 1019-1042.
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