Section 1: Foreword

Innovation comes from those who see things that others don’t.

A lot has changed since I wrote The Four Steps to Epiphany just over a decade ago—a book about the Customer Development process and how it changes the way start-ups are built. The Four Steps drew the distinction that “start-ups are not smaller versions of large companies.” It defined a start-up as a “temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.” Today its concepts of “minimum viable product,” “iterate and pivot,” “get out of the building,” and “no business plan survives first contact with customers” have become part of the entrepreneurial lexicon. When I first conceived of these notions, I wanted to change the way start-ups were built, the way business models were tested, and the way customer feedback was integrated. Over the past three years our Lean LaunchPad/NSF Innovation Corps classes have been teaching hundreds of entrepreneurial teams a year how to build their start-ups by getting out of the building and testing their hypotheses behind their business model. Through this body of work, I believe we have fundamentally advanced the process of crafting and refining business models.

In Disrupt Together, Steve Spinelli, Heather McGowan, and their team of experts dissect the customer development process by unpacking the customer-discovery and customer-validation phases with tools from the fields of design and ethnography. Most entrepreneurs begin with solving a problem better than anyone else. In this book, Spinelli and McGowan bring a team of experts from a broad range of fields such as ethnography, design, medicine, engineering, and business to show how finding the right problems to solve yields superior entrepreneurial insights—making for better ideas to bring through the start-up funnel. For example, ethnography offers methods to peek around corners and understand concepts like shifting cultural norms and the impact these dramatic shifts have on customer desires and expectations. Tools from the design fields offer means of better probing emerging opportunities spaces through culling insights from latent customer needs and desires. Design thinking also offers superior tools to prototype products, services, and experience for better customer validation. They dive deeper into understanding how interdisciplinary teams bring diverse learning styles offering multiplicative rather than additive impacts to the challenge at hand, often identifying, isolating, and addressing later-stage hurdles earlier in the process when the stakes are lower.

Full disclosure: Philadelphia University’s current president, Stephen Spinelli, was one of my mentors in learning how to teach entrepreneurship. At Babson College he was chair of the Entrepreneurship department and built the school into one of the most innovative entrepreneurial programs in the U.S. In 2008 Steve became president of Philadelphia University. Steve, Heather, and their team have taken the approach articulated here in Disrupt Together to transform university education through a new model of professional undergraduate education based on instilling skills of interdisciplinary problem solving, innovation, and agility. In 2011 I was so moved by their vision and progress that I wrote a blog posting about called “College and Business Will Never Be the Same.” This posting was so popular that Fast Company and Xconomy picked it up, and soon Pearson/The Financial Times came knocking—asking them to codify their vision and process with their advisors into a guidebook for both the academy and the corporation. Here, Spinelli and McGowan assemble a dream team of experts who offer sage insights into the process of opportunity recognition.

Steve Blank
Menlo Park, California
2013