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Industria 4.0, Big Data Analytics, emprendimiento digital y nuevos modelos de negocio

Where can I start reading about customer development, lean startup and business model canvas?

As soon as we start exploring current trends we can conclude that, without a shadow of a doubt, resources such as customer development, lean startup and business model canvas constitute the methodological foundations of what we could call a new "entrepreneurship-intensive economy". The resource that best puts them into context and interconnects them, and which represents an excellent starting point to begin exploring them, is the article "Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything", written by Steve Blank and published in Harvard Business Review in May of 2013.

The article begins with the ideas that Steve Blank already proposed in 2003 in his book "The Four Steps to the Epiphany", covers how those concepts have evolved as new approaches and tools have been created to complement them and make it easier to put them into practice, and mentions the top-reference authors and books that have been published along these years.

In particular, the article explains how Steve Blank and Eric Ries met each other, when in 2004 the former invested in a startup cofounded by the latter and Will Harvey and insisted, as a condition of that investment, that Ries and Harvey took the course lectured by Blank at the Haas School of Business ar the University of California at Berkeley. It was then when Eric Ries started connecting three basic concepts: Steve Blank's lessons about the practice of Customer Development, Eric Ries' own experiences as a software developer using Agile Development methodologies, and the connection that Eric Ries identified between those ideas and the Lean Manufacturing principles coming from the industrial world. From that point on, Eric Ries worked developing his methodological proposal and finally published his book "The Lean Startup" in 2011.

In parallel to this process, across the pond (more precisely, in Switzerland), Alexander Osterwalder finished his PhD Thesis in 2004, supervised by Yves Pigneur, on a "Business Model Ontology" where he already proposed a schema based on nine blocks that characterize a business model (a first non-graphic "seed" of the Business Model Canvas). As his work becomes more and more popular, they start thinking of writing a book explaining this tool and expanding it with experiences and examples gathered from hundreds of practitioners all over the world. As a result they publish in 2010 the book "Business Model Generation", where they present a graphic representation (the canvas) of the schema devised by Osterwalder, that Steve Blank immediately adopts as his standard tool to register hypotheses and validations coming from the experimentation and contrast with customers.

Based on the integration of all these methodological developments, Steve Blank revises his former book and publishes, together with Bob Dorf, "The Startup Owner's Manual" in 2012 , as a reference book with a step-by-step guide to put all these techniques into practice.

In short, the article "Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything" allows us to see in perspective all these evolutions and how these tools and methods integrate with each other, forming a global proposal around the focus on experimentation, customer's feedback and iterative design. The article also points to the basic references through which we can explore every one of these "puzzle pieces" in more detail.

[Haz clic aquí para la versión en español de esta entrada]

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