Every startup entrepreneur or corporate entrepreneur makes certain assumptions about the market, technology, talent, organizational positioning, the economy, or what have you. Often largely based on guesswork, those untested assumptions get baked into business plans to which their creators, showing admirable drive and determination, doggedly adhere to, come hell or high water.
While such a go-with-your-gut, pedal-to-the-metal approach to managing business startups may make for great film and business folklore, it bears little resemblance to reality, and emulating it has been the ruination of many a promising startup. Groupon, PayPal, Hotmail, YouTube, and Twitter are just a few notable examples of successful ventures that began life as something altogether different. Fortunately, their creators had the wisdom to abandon their original models and the courage to change course, often dramatically, at least once on their road to riches. This ability to adapt holds true for IBM and Corning but not for Kodak and Nortel. Why?
In Pivot, startup wizards Remy Arteaga and Joanne Hyland go beyond the lean startup to provide you with a revolutionary new model for managing individual and corporate startups based on testing, experimentation, learning, and adaptation.
While it may have been a good first step in the right direction, the lean startup model, with its focus on managing risk, has little to offer when it comes to managing and reducing the many uncertainties that can bedevil the best laid plans of startup entrepreneurs and corporate entrepreneurs alike. In its place, Arteaga and Hyland propose a three-phase approach consisting of:
- Plant: The Discovery phase. You get proven strategies and techniques for generating fresh ideas, conceptualizing new business opportunities, clearly stating new business concepts, and defining a compelling business startup vision.
- Pivot: The Incubation phase. The authors arm you with powerful tools for testing underlying assumptions and identifying business uncertainties, while developing actionable business experiments that quickly get you to your pivot point.
- Propel: The Acceleration phase. You’ll discover time-tested methods for precisely setting the pace of business scale-up and growth so as to capture the opportunity, without exceeding organizational tolerances or exhausting limited resources.
In addition, the Pivot companion websites feature a digital toolkit for implementing the authors’ methodologies. With powerful tools corresponding to the Plant, Pivot and Propel phases, it makes adapting the Pivot model to your specific startup situation quick and easy. Supplying a comprehensive innovation management framework along with powerful tools for minimizing business uncertainties, learning faster and better than the competition, and changing your innovation game, Pivot is an indispensable resource for entrepreneurs, corporate entrepreneurs, innovation strategists, venture capitalists, and angel investors.
From the Back Cover
In Pivot, startup wizards Remy Arteaga and Joanne Hyland go beyond the lean startup to provide you with a revolutionary new model for managing individual and corporate startups based on testing, experimentation, learning, and adaptation.
While it may have been a good first step in the right direction, the lean startup model, with its focus on managing risk, has little to offer when it comes to managing and reducing the many uncertainties that can bedevil the best laid plans of startup entrepreneurs and corporate entrepreneurs alike. In its place, Arteaga and Hyland propose a three-phase approach consisting of:
1 Plant: The Discovery phase. You get proven strategies and techniques for generating fresh ideas, conceptualizing new business opportunities, clearly stating new business concepts, and defining a compelling business startup vision.
2 Pivot: The Incubation phase. The authors arm you with powerful tools for testing underlying assumptions and identifying business uncertainties, while developing actionable business experiments that quickly get you to your pivot point.
3 Propel: The Acceleration phase. You’ll discover time-tested methods for precisely setting the pace of business scale-up and growth so as to capture the opportunity, without exceeding organizational tolerances or exhausting limited resources.
In addition, the Pivot companion websites feature a digital toolkit for implementing the authors’ methodologies. With powerful tools corresponding to the Plant, Pivot and Propel phases, it makes adapting the Pivot model to your specific startup situation quick and easy. Supplying a comprehensive innovation management framework along with powerful tools for minimizing business uncertainties, learning faster and better than the competition, and changing your innovation game, Pivot is an indispensable resource for entrepreneurs, corporate entrepreneurs, innovation strategists, venture capitalists, and angel investors.
About the Author
Remy Arteaga has more than twenty years’ experience in entrepreneurial, innovative, and strategic roles. Remy began his career with GM, where he was part of an internal consulting group, the sole mission of which was to change the way GM did business. There, he developed ideation, customer needs, and competitive analysis business methods that were deployed throughout the company. Following GM, Remy spent several years as an IT consultant before launching his first startup. Over the next 20 years, Remy started up five successful startups in varied industries, from medical devices to software. As COO and founder of Extreme Interactive Media, Inc., he built the company into the top competitor in its media space. In 2007, Remy was named CEO of DualAlign LLC, an Albany, New York–based technology startup focused on computer vision software solutions. Most recently, Remy served as the Program Director of the Entrepreneurship Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Joanne Hyland is President of the rInnovation Group (rInnovation) and former Vice President, New Venture Development, at Nortel Networks. As a Founding Partner in rInnovation, Joanne works with major corporations across diverse industries in the U.S., Canada, Denmark, Germany, and elsewhere to link innovation with strategy and to develop systems, leadership and culture capabilities that drive growth and corporate renewal. Joanne speaks regularly on topics related to innovation and corporate entrepreneurship and is/has been a member of the MBA and executive education faculties at Babson College, the Business Institute in Denmark, the Danish Technical University, MIT, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Stanford University, and the Tata Management Training Center. At Nortel Networks, Joanne and her team founded its internal venturing program, a multimillion-dollar investment fund that resulted in twelve business startups, one of which, Bill Me Later®, reached close to a billion-dollar exit in October 2008 when it was bought by eBay/PayPal.
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