The Lean StartUp - 2 Define

The author provides an example of a person he met in one of his lectures and he provided all the prerequisites that an entrepreneur should have in his disposal. These are:

1. Proper team structure

2. Good personnel

3. A strong vision for the future

4. An appetite for risk taking

The book then continued to assert that the definition of entrepreneur is not just the person who starts a company completely off the ground. The definition of an entrepreneur also includes people who are part of a large company and are managing a team that is assigned to create new ventures or product/services innovations.  

Additionally, the definition of a startup provided by the book is the following:

"A startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty."

Therefore, this definition is recognised by the example of a large company called Intuit, which created a vastly successful product, SnapTax. SnapTax provides a simpler way of filing your tax returns and it was created within a large company. Consequently, Intuit or more particularly, the team within Intuit that was given the freedom to innovate, would certainly fit the definition of a startup due to the creation of a new product under conditions of extreme uncertainty, as it had never been done before. 

Moreover, a great point is made when the author rightly recognises that "a company's only sustainable path to long-term economic growth is to build an 'innovation factory' that uses Lean StartUp techniques to create disruptive innovations on a continuous basis." 

The author of this blog agrees with the statement that to build long-term economic growth a company must be innovating on a continuous basis, because as Warren Buffett once in an annual general meeting of Berkshire Hathaway stated, numerous companies fail in the long-term because they get complacent. Take Amazon, for instance, a company that started off as an e-commerce book-selling business and is now a conglomerate with hundreds of different products and subsidiaries including one in the self-driving car business.