The Innovator's Method: Bringing the Lean Start-up into Your Organization

✍️ Nathan Furr

This is a very interesting book that tries to convey in a unified way the lessons of the ‘Lean Startup’, ‘Design Thinking’ movements. As with some business books it tends to be a bit verbose and repetitive (therefore the 3-star rating instead of a 4-star).

The Innovator’s Method can be summarized in the following steps:
- Come up with an insight.
- Understand your customer problem and needs: customer pain points.
- Prototype as quick as possible: virtual prototypes, minimum viable prototype.
- Develop an minimal awesome product.
- Create a business model.
- Scale: here is where the growing pains appear. Entrepreneurial manangement needs to blend with traditional management. Replacing T-shaped people for I-shaped ones.

The book uses companies like Intuit, Rent the Runway, Banco Davivienda, and Godrej, among others, as case studies.

I would have replaced some of the repetitive parts for an appendix that summarized - not textually, but as bullet points or graphically - how each of the companies depicted in the book successfully (or unsuccessfully) applied each Innovator’s Method steps. A one-page per company summary would have been of great help for the readers since the different steps taken by the companies are scattered along the book chapters.