Blog

Eric Reis has created a movement with the publication of his book The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. Based on his experience with consumer software, he encourages entrepreneurs to launch “minimally viable products,” run as many “experiments” with these minimally viable products as is possible to accelerate learning about what customers want, and thereby “pivot” to a value proposition that customers want. It sounds quite compelling until you realize that this entire approach is based on one of the great myths about innovation: that customers have latent unarticulated needs, needs that they cannot tell us.

People use metaphors to understand complex phenomena. Metaphors help us to quickly grasp the nature of something elusive. Sports provide us with many excellent metaphors for business and life such as, when we’re trying to anticipate market trends, we might tell a colleague “Skate to where the puck will be.” Or to encourage a salesperson to make more calls, we say “You can’t score if you don’t shoot.”