Customer Integration in Entrepreneurial Experiments beyond the Product-Market Fit
Sprache des Vortragstitels:
Englisch
Original Tagungtitel:
21st CINet Conference: Practicing Continuous Innovation in Digital Ecosystems
Sprache des Tagungstitel:
Englisch
Original Kurzfassung:
Large corporates are nowadays engaging with startups as a way to manage ambidexterity, as a mechanism to acquire new competencies and speed up innovation. However, the approaches of startups to innovation are very different from those deployed in established companies. In the last decade, Lean Startup has consolidated in the entrepreneurial scene as the method to go for. Lean Startup enforces entrepreneurs to constantly experiment with the environment to test their hypothesis until reaching the perfect product-market fit, in this case for the established company. In this experimentation process, customers are tightly involved. Based on their opinions, the entrepreneurial hypothesis might be either validated, modified or rejected.
This research will examine the extent to which the integration of customers in early-stage entrepreneurial experiments, and specifically in the Lean Startup method, influence the innovativeness of an entrepreneurial hypothesis. Additionally, whether the validation or the rejection of the hypothesis is affected by the design of the experiments and the participation of customers on those.