Entrepreneurship and Innovation Education

5From Business Model Design to Design Thinking and Lean Startup

“Build it and they will come” is not a strategy; it’s a prayer.

Steve Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany

Innovation has been defined as “a good idea well executed” (Brown and Katz 2019). So far, we have discussed the former and not the latter part of the innovation process. In the three preceding chapters, we have seen how to develop one’s idea from an emergent to a more mature vision. But having a clear vision is not enough. Success depends much more on the way it is executed. This is the product development part of innovation. The rather static exercise of business planning and the more dynamic exercise of business modeling are a necessary prelude to this phase. Now, we must start discussing how to go from ideas to market.

We will start with the traditional way companies have developed products for the past 70 years, the so-called “stage-gate” approach. This is clearly based on the causation rationale previously presented. We will then discuss the more recent influences of agile project management and effectuation on a fairly recent approach known as “Design Thinking”.

5.1. New product development: the traditional stage-gate approach

The process of structuring investment decisions in phases has been used in large projects throughout the second half of the 20th Century. Large companies or complex organizations like NASA pioneered the notion of reducing risk by establishing a number of criteria that projects ...