BUS5 182: Business Plans for New Ventures

This edition examines entrepreneurship through an easy, four-step process that clearly outlines both the excitement and the difficulty of launching one's own business. Careful to identify failures as well as successes. This book is a straightforward guide to starting one's own business.

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business. The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on "validated learning," rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute. Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs--in companies of all sizes--a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it's too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.

Explains how to transform ideas into action, offering a step-by-step approach to launching great products, services, and companies and demonstrating how managers can unleash a creative approach to business at established companies.

A behind-the-scenes look at how tomorrow's hottest startups are being primed for greatness   Investment firm Y Combinator is the most sought-after home for startups in Silicon Valley. Twice a year, it funds dozens of just-founded startups and provides three months of guidance from Paul Graham, YC's impresario, and his partners. Receiving an offer from YC creates the opportunity of a lifetime.   Acclaimed journalist Randall Stross was granted unprecedented access to Y Combinator, enabling a unique inside tour of the world of software startups. Over the course of a summer, we watch as a group of founders scramble to make something people want.   This is the definitive story of a seismic shift in the business world, in which coding skill trumps experience, undergraduates confidently take on Goliaths, and investors fall in love.

What would you be willing to do for the rest of your life...? It's a question most of us consider only hypothetically-opting instead to "do what we have to do" to earn a living. But in the critically acclaimed bestseller "The Monk and the Riddle", entrepreneurial sage Randy Komisar asks us to answer it for real. The book's timeless advice - to make work pay not just in cash, but in experience, satisfaction, and joy - will be embraced by anyone who wants success to come not just from what they do, but from who they are.At once a fictional tale of Komisar's encounters with a would-be entrepreneur and a personal account of how Komisar found meaning not in work's rewards but in work itself, the book illustrates what's wrong with the mainstream thinking that we should sacrifice our lives to make a living. Described by Fortune.com as "part personal essay, part fictional narrative and part meditation on the nature of work and life," "The Monk and the Riddle" is essential reading on the art of creating a life while making a living. 'Belongs in a category by itself...The best thing I've read all year' - "San Francisco Examiner". 'A timely book' - "USA Today". 'A self-help manual and business fable rolled into one' - "The Times, London".

How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great? Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years.

Why is it that business in California's Silicon Valley flourished while along Route 128 in Massachusetts declined in the 90s? The answer, Saxenian suggests, has to do with the fact that despite similar histories and technologies, Silicon Valley developed a decentralized but cooperative industrial system while Route 128 came to be dominated by independent, self-sufficient corporations. The result of more than one hundred interviews, this compelling analysis highlights the importance of local sources of competitive advantage in a volatile world economy.