How to introduce Lean Startup process into a medium-sized IT vendor, namely Futurice?

Abstract

Following Anderson and Tushman (1990), companies are facing exceptional competition in today’s era of ferment. Pressured by an innovation impetus, companies seek new means of doing and producing. Start-ups are seen as a model of innovation due to their potential disruptive power and are increasingly turned to as identifying promising means and processes, as presented by the Lean Startup.

Though a highly popular topic in research, there is little empirical evidence that holds water in a more critical scrutiny of the applicability of Lean Startup principles, their benefits and compatibility with other, effective means to deal with the context of complexity, however fall short when facing extreme uncertainty, where high levels of design need to be incorporated.

In this thesis I explore ways to introduce Lean Startup into an agile medium-sized IT vendor, namely Futurice acting as an empirical environment. Utilising co-creative methods I map the culture, define customer relationships and present project cases, in order to identify opportunities and limitations of adopting Lean Startup thinking within the specific setting of Futurice. As a solution I present three actionable steps, that are the Lean Startup Poster, an artefact to educate and enable communication, the Lean Startup Roadmap, a set of actionable steps, and the Lean Startup Testbed Proposal, an artefact-based design heuristic to vertically and horizontally integrate Lean Startup as a process into Futurice.