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Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything

Download, 2005, Acrylic on linen, 1.5 m x 1.5 m, Wallace Trust Collection; Photography: Courtesy of the artist and Gow Langsford Gallery   Sara Hughes

Launching a new enterprise—whether it’s a tech start-up, a small business, or an initiative within a large corporation—has always been a hit-or-miss proposition. According to the decades-old formula, you write a business plan, pitch it to investors, assemble a team, introduce a product, and start selling as hard as you can. And somewhere in this sequence of events, you’ll probably suffer a fatal setback. The odds are not with you: As new research by Harvard Business School’s Shikhar Ghosh shows, 75% of all start-ups fail.

Read more on Lean business model or related topics Start-ups and Experimentation
A version of this article appeared in the May 2013 issue of Harvard Business Review.

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