Who Is This Book for?

If you’ve ever recognized a giant gap or unanswered question in your business model and had no idea how to go about filling it, this book is for you. You may be asking:

• Who are our customers?
• What are the most important features of our product?
• Will people actually pay for this?

This book is for new businesses or innovation projects where the business model is partially or completely unknown. Your job title might be:

• CEO of an early-stage startup
• Product Manager
• Entrepreneur-in-Residence

Previous Experience

You don’t need any previous experience to benefit from this book.

The one thing you do need to know is that some parts of your business model are unknown. And the way to figure them out is to do research and experiments in the real world with your customers.

Innovation at Scale

This book is also very useful for those managing or assisting in the management of large numbers of innovation products. This includes job titles like:

• Chief Innovation Officer
• VP of Innovation
• Accelerator Manager
• Lean Startup/Innovation Coach

If you are in any of these positions, this book serves as a versatile and quick reference guide for almost any startup you’ll be dealing with. It can also be used to diagnose typical startup problems.

This book is a Creative Commons project, which means you can use it as training material for your startups without any additional cost.

Stage and Industry

The methods here work fine for small, early-stage startups, and equally fine for teams in large companies trying something new, risky, and outside the normal business model.

These methods work for any industry, but there is a bias toward providing examples and case studies from the technology industry. Other industries will be included as case studies become available.

Classroom Use

This book is meant to be used, not read. So it won’t work well for purely academic learning classroom environment. It will work if you get your students into the real world with real customers. Real experience beats case studies.

So if you are a student and your teacher just handed this to you, get ready to get kicked out of the building and put to work.

Existing Businesses Use

This book is not specifically designed for companies executing on an existing business model.

While some of the techniques listed here work quite well for optimizing an existing product or service, you’ll have to modify the techniques and make sure you’re considering potential side effects.

Be careful running experiments on your existing brand!