The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage as it is for a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate the fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business. The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are capital efficient and that effectively leverage human creativity. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on "validated learning" and rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counterintuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and reveal what customers really want. The Lean method enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute. Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs - in companies of all sizes - a way to continuously test their vision, to adapt and adjust before it's too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in an age when companies need to innovate more than ever.