Quotes About Innovation

It is also the right way to think about productivity in a startup: not in terms of how much stuff we are building but in terms of how much validated learning we're getting for our efforts.

I call the traditional numbers used to judge startups "vanity metrics," and innovation accounting requires us to avoid the temptation to use them.

We do everything wrong: instead of spending years perfecting our technology, we build a minimum viable product, an early product that is terrible, full of bugs and crash-your-computer-yes-really stability problems. Then we ship it to customers way before it's ready.

Es una de las lecciones más importantes del método científico: si no puedes fracasar, no puedes aprender.

A startup's job is to (1) rigorously measure where it is right now, confronting the hard truths that assessment reveals, and then (2) devise experiments to learn how to move the real numbers closer to the ideal reflected in the business plan.

As Cook says, "Success is not delivering a feature; success is learning how to solve the customer's problem."4

we think we can truly short-circuit the ramp by killing things that don't make sense fast and doubling down on the ones that do.

Startups don't starve; they drown." There

Startups do not yet know who their customer is or what their product should be.

Although lean production techniques are powerful, they are only a manifestation of a high-functioning organization that is committed to achieving maximum performance by employing the right measures of progress over the long term. Process is only the foundation upon which a great company culture can develop. But without this foundation, efforts to encourage learning, creativity, and innovation will fall flat—as many disillusioned directors of HR can attest.

Instead of working in separate departments, engineers and designers would work together side by side on one feature at a time. Whenever that feature was ready to be tested with customers, they immediately would release a new version of the product, which would go live on our website for a relatively small number of people.

They are fast. They embrace new thinking. They are geared for disruption and innovation through uncertainty.

A Start Up is an institution designed to thrive in the soil of extreme uncertainty

Entrepreneurs are everywhere. You don't have to work in a garage to be in a startup. The concept of entrepreneurship includes anyone who works within my definition of a startup: a human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty. That means entrepreneurs are everywhere and the Lean Startup approach can work in any size company, even a very large enterprise, in any sector or industry.

This is also common with pivots; it is not necessary to throw out everything that came before and start over. Instead, it's about repurposing what has been built and what has been learned to find a more positive direction.

Although we write the feedback loop as Build-Measure-Learn because the activities happen in that order, our planning really works in the reverse order: we figure out what we need to learn, use innovation accounting to figure out what we need to measure to know if we are gaining validated learning, and then figure out what product we need to build to run that experiment and get that measurement.

It does not matter how fast we can build. It does not matter how fast we can measure. What matters is how fast we can get through the entire loop.

Because startups often accidentally build something nobody wants, it doesn't matter much if they do it on time and on budget. The

Getting a startup's engine of growth up and running is hard enough, but the truth is that every engine of growth eventually runs out of gas. Every engine is tied to a given set of customers and their related habits, preferences, advertising channels, and interconnections. At some point, that set of customers will be exhausted.

Most important, a disciplined team can experiment with its own working style and draw meaningful conclusions.

I have always been a bit of a troublemaker at the companies at which I have worked, pushing for rapid iteration, data-driven decision making, and early customer involvement.

At any time, the company could invest its energy in finding new customers, servicing existing customers better, improving overall quality, or driving down costs. In

The method I recommend is called innovation accounting, a quantitative approach that allows us to see whether our engine-tuning efforts are bearing fruit. It also allows us to create learning milestones, which are an alternative to traditional business and product milestones. Learning milestones are useful for entrepreneurs as a way of assessing their progress accurately and objectively; they are also invaluable to managers and investors who must hold entrepreneurs accountable.

A head start is rarely large enough to matter, and time spent in stealth mode—away from customers—is unlikely to provide a head start. The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.