Lean principles were developed in the early 1970s by Toyota in Japan. The company implemented lean manufacturing methods to optimize its manufacturing processes (Womack & Jones, 2003). The basic idea of lean principles is to streamline the manufacturing process by reducing any waste in the process – this can mean either reducing resources (human or material) or eliminating unnecessary activities or expenses, such as reducing storage space. This strategy revolutionized manufacturing processes in the automotive industry.
Since then, lean principles have become important not only for management as such, but also for other fields, such as the IT sector, where lean concepts are widely used. These methods are also applied in purely non-production environments. An example is the “Lean Startup” (Ries, 2017) – an innovative method for start-up companies that claims that the most effective innovation is the one that users are really interested in and in demand. According to Ries (Ries, 2017), the biggest mistake is to create a product or service that no one needs. This concept is highly skype database relevant to any strategy or method focused on working with innovations.
The term “ Lean Startup ” was developed in the IT field for software startups. However, this term is increasingly used for other types of innovation projects in other fields. A startup is defined as a human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty. Therefore, not all new companies are classified as startups and on the other hand, even large, established multinational companies can sometimes correspond to the term startup. (Ries, 2017)
If a startup cannot afford to have its entire investment depend on the success of a single product or service, the lean startup methodology suggests that by developing and launching a minimum viable product (MVP) that is not yet complete, the company can leverage customer feedback to further tailor the product or service to the specific needs of its customers. (Ries, 2011)
Lean startup – methods
In the next section, we will introduce the most commonly used tools of the lean startup method, defined by Erick Ries in his book The Lean Startup (2011), as well as methods that build on and enrich these methods.