Working on my lit review, I have chosen to focus on the two methods Lean startup and Pretotyping. While there are countless of blog articles on what the pretotyping methods entail and how to apply the lean philosophy to a business, I am more interested in what these methods actually do for a company. Seemingly they help to fail faster, thus avoiding pursuing fruitless projects, make better decisions at a lower cost and overall help business innovate.
While I have found nothing on the the success rate of companies implementing pretotyping, I did find a couple of studies detailing the success of implementing lean philosophy in larger companies.
In my coming lit review I write:
Sisson & Elshennawy (2015) have done a study on the latter. They claim that only 2-3% (p. 263) of companies reach the desired results when implementing the lean philosophy as a business strategy. This however is based on implementing the philosophy in already existing larger companies, and not in startups. In their study they narrow the barriers to implementing lean down to some important factors that successful implementers of lean have in common. Among these they note that company culture is vital. The management needs to be on board, and lead the way, while slowly growing a lean culture from inside and out (Sisson & Elshennawy, 2015).
In other words, implementing lean in a big company is a slow and rigorous process. But one that can prove very worthwhile when done right.
So what about using the lean philosophy in a startup? While there are many praising the philosophy and methods, there are a few critics.
From my coming lit review:
Andreas Klinger (2013) states a few reasons why he thinks the lean philosophy is often bad for startups. To him it comes down to a number of small but important details in understanding the lean philosophy. As a startup and looking for the way forward, he suggests, that instead of gathering data on all options, finding which one is the better of them, you should instead focus on your first intuitive choice with a smaller amount of data, and test if that is the wrong choice forward. If it’s not, you continue. He argues, that as a startup, you are often happy if the next big choice you make won’t kill your business. His major criticism with lean, is not as much in the philosophy itself, but more in how it is being practiced by a large amount of people. Instead of critically using the philosophy as a tool bag, he thinks the majority use it as a strict process to follow, slowing down the process and not gaining much from it (Klinger, 2013).
There seem to be criticisms about lean in implementing it in both large and small companies, and that the barriers are generally larger. While pretotyping was born in huge company like Google, it’s methods seem easier to introduce on a smaller scale in a company, and even in startups. I have not yet found any data to support this, but it is something I will be on the lookout for.
Klinger, A. (2013). Why Lean Startup sucks for startups. ANDREAS KLINGER. Retrieved from http://klinger.io/post/69794653694/why-lean-startup-sucks-for-startups
Sisson, J., & Elshennawy, A. (2015). Achieving success with Lean. International Journal Of Lean Six Sigma, 6(3), 263-280. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/ijlss-07-2014-0024
Jeppe Kjøller - A reflective journal 