Challenges of lean customer discovery as invention

Abstract

The lean startup approach to developing products and businesses has become central to entrepreneurial culture. Touted as a scientific approach to creating successful startups, the lean approach relies on customer discovery-a process in which entrepreneurs validate hypotheses about their business models via a rhetorically specific model of interviews with potential customers. In this article, we examine canonical texts of the movement and our own experiences in three lean startup boot camps, in the process exploring the notable absences and silences in the narrow range of texts that define Lean Startup. Lean methods as practiced by government agencies tend to exclude research on user experience design, technology transfer, and qualitative research methods, and foster an underlying suspicion of academic expertise in favor of relying solely on the self-reporting from potential customer segments.