Overcoming Innovator’s Block
The one infallible trick (well, it works for me) you can use when you’re trying to come up with a new project idea but you’re getting nothing but a painful…
Startup founders: allergic to experiences they should learn to love?
Do startups fail as a result of the founder’s attitude towards doing things they don’t think they need to do?
The switch from doing jobs to starting startups: will we even notice?
Could our increasingly online lifestyles morph smoothly into self-employment if today’s culture of ’employee-based careers for all’ gradually fades into oblivion?
Lean Startup Methodology, Critical Design Theory: Separated at birth?
Lean startups use wild speculations about imaginary products to start conversations with customers aimed at eliciting real requirements. Critical Design aims to make things which provoke enlightening responses. Snap?
Mel Brooks Producers as a model for lean startups
Founders having an innovative idea, a fruitful search for a solution, generous early investors: what could possibly go wrong?
Instead of just scalable startups, a scalable startup ecosystem
‘Adopt lean startup methodologies’ is seen by many as the best advice to give startups, but how do we know if this advice is making a substantial positive contribution to the wider economy?
Did Eric Schmidt really invent The Pivot before Eric Ries?
Google’s Schmidt talked about ‘morphing’ a project, but watching this Marissa Mayer video today, as she describes her boss’s suggestion three years before Ries’s, although the idea and the approach are different, the outcomes feel uncannily similar
Dragging small traditional businesses into the startup innovation ecosystem
Small traditional businesses? They’re already ‘inside’ the startup world, aren’t they? No. They typically know nothing about such things as Lean Startup, Startup Weekend or Y Combinator, and even when they do, they think it has nothing to do with them. Are they right?
Has Scoble suddenly turned anti-Lean Startup?
He just said: ‘I hate the term “minimal viable product.” That’s like telling me “we’re shipping without any features because, well, our investors and advisors told us to ship and fix the product later.”
Lean Startup, but without Eric Ries?
“There are venture firms here in The Valley that won’t even fund a company unless they employ lean startup methodologies”
What if startup ideas didn’t matter to investors?
Would you invest in founders pitching a project that you didn’t really believe in, for reasons you didn’t tell them about?
What’s different for VCs in the era of the lean startup?
New ‘iterative’ startup methodologies, such as Eric Ries’s Lean Startup and Steve Blank’s Customer Development, raise just as many important new questions about investors as they do about startups
Why startup is a crazy term
Steve Blank and Eric Ries each have different definitions of a startup to ours. None of us nail it
Is the whole lean startup thing really nothing more than UX?
If you’re thinking: “Aha! at last, a lean startup skeptic! I always suspected all that MVP and pivot stuff was really just snake oil!” then this video is for you. But buckle up, you’re in for a bumpy user experience
Extreme uncertainty over startups as a solution to everything
Startups attempt innovation under conditions of extreme uncertainty. Is it possible that we can find new ways to solve the world’s biggest problems using ‘extreme uncertainty’?
Unemployment, social media addiction and startup proliferation
What are the differences in social media activity when comparing employed and unemployed people? Would you take on a job that was underpaid and unattractive, start or join a fun but non-paying, penniless startup, anything so as not to have fewer social experiences to share online?
Thousands of lean startup devotees bravely endure shaky YouTube video
Yes, it’s Eric Ries classic ‘Minimum Viable Product’ presentation. It’s so absorbing that you soon stop noticing the jitters. Oh, and no, you can’t even cheat by just listening to it. There are slides. And if you saw it in 2009 but you did nothing about it, shame on you, it’s time to watch it again.
Customer Development. Trendy Phrase. Gimmick?
It doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia article yet (as at 2nd of February 2011). It came from someone called Steve Blank and a book from 2005, and yet it’s the hottest thing at all the top business schools. This video interview explains why
Lean investing: what is it?
Dave McClure is not exactly a shy or timid voice in the startup investment community. He offers the unique perspective of someone who describes themselves as a geek who became a startup founder who moved on to become an investor in many startups.