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How to Start a New Venture in 12 Weeks
While being in Sydney in early 2016, I joined a team to create a food delivery startup as part of a Management & Innovation workshop at UNSW Business School in conjunction with Michael Crouch Innovation Centre. I worked on this project part time while conducting research at UNSW into policy towards entrepreneurship and innovation and drafting a policy review of the Tech Startups Action Plan by the City of Sydney.
The workshop was organised around the structure of typical startup accelerator programs, working on specific challenges while developing a working business model over a period of 12 weeks. It was a 5 person team with local ties in Australia, Denmark, Germany, Spain and the U.S. and backgrounds in engineering, marketing, business and process management.
The Lean Startup
As one might expect, the workshop was organised around methodologies postulated by Eric Ries in his book “The Lean Startup”. Based on lean principles such as validated learning and innovation accounting, the team worked through several Build-Measure-Learn feedback loops to iterate the main features of the business model, especially the value and growth hypothesis’.
The team utilized design thinking methodologies, experimented with real life feedback and consulted with industry mentors. While defining and…
