Lean startup | EPFL Graph Search

Le lean start up (de l'anglais lean, « maigre », « sans gras », « dégraissé ») est une approche spécifique du démarrage d'une activité économique et du lancement d'un produit. Elle repose sur le « » (vérification de la validité des concepts), l'expérimentation scientifique et le design itératif. Elle tend à réduire les cycles de commercialisation des produits, à mesurer régulièrement les progrès réalisés, et à obtenir des retours de la part des utilisateurs. Dans cette optique les entreprises, en particulier les startups, cherchent à concevoir des produits et services qui satisfont au mieux la demande de leurs consommateurs, avec un investissement initial minimal. Le concept est initialement développé en 2008 par Eric Ries sur la base de la pensée lean dans des entreprises high-tech de la Silicon Valley. Depuis lors il a connu un grand succès à travers le monde, notamment grâce à son livre, The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Suc

Essays on the Role of Policy and Venture Financing in Clean Technology Innovation

Matthias David van den Heuvel

This thesis aims to provide novel analyses and data that improve the understanding of the financing of investments in clean technologies. In particular, this thesis explores the role that private and public actors play in supporting young innovative firms. The first chapter of this thesis exploits original data on about 1000 startups that have participated in Venture Kick, the leading Swiss venture competition. We study the circumstances under which venture competitions' certification and cash prize impact startups' future survival and funding prospects. On the one hand, we observe that the certification only has a significant effect on startups whose quality can be more objectively assessed by experts (e.g., hard sciences startups). On the other hand, we find that the competition's cash prize only extends the runway of startups with low running costs (e.g., internet & mobile). These results highlight industry-specific heterogeneity in the effect of early-stage startup support, which bears implications for the design of entrepreneurial programs.The second chapter takes a step back and looks into the role of two prominent actors involved in financing new clean technologies: venture capital (VC) and governments. This essay examines the reasons behind the failure of the VC boom in clean energy startups in the early 2010s. We find that lackluster demand for clean energy products and a lower potential for outsized returns make clean energy firms less attractive to VC than startups in ICT or biotech. Conversely, characteristics such as high-capital intensity or long development timeframe seem to be less important. These findings suggest that the most effective way for governments to improve the attractiveness of early-stage clean energy investments is to implement demand-side policies rather than to provide direct financial support. With demand-side policies in place, governments could then try to plug the remaining funding gaps themselves by targeting startups with limited potential for outsized returns.In the second half of this thesis, the focus shifts onto governments' environmental policies and how they affect private investments in clean technologies. In the third chapter, we develop novel news-based indices of US environmental policy using text-mining techniques. We show that our general environmental policy index and sub-topic indices (e.g., renewables or climate negotiation) meaningfully capture the evolution of environmental policy in the United States. Using these indices, we find that greater salience of environmental policy is associated with increased VC investments in clean technologies and reduced stock returns for high-emissions firms. In the fourth and last chapter, we study the impact of policy uncertainty on private investment decisions. To do so, we construct a novel index of environmental policy uncertainty (EnvPU). This index reveals that uncertainty is pervasive in the history of environmental policy and is often synchronized with election cycles. We find that increases in our EnvPU index are associated with lower VC investments in cleantech startups and higher volatility in green firms' stocks. The findings from Chapters 3 and 4 suggest that, while the increased salience of environmental policy can boost investments, policymakers should ensure that their actions do not exacerbate policy uncertainty and hinder investments towards a low-carbon economy.

EPFL2022

University technology transfer office business models: One size does not fit all

Francesco Baldi, Christopher Tucci

Technology transfer processes enable universities to increase their positive impact on society by pursuing their entrepreneurial mission in several ways. By analyzing quantitative and qualitative data collected in a longitudinal dataset of 60 U.S. universities during the period 2002-2012, this article identifies four types of technology transfer business models that may generate economic and non-economic linkages that need to be evaluated. Findings reveal that business models that leverage high-quality research (i.e., catalyst) and startup creation (i.e., orchestrator of local buzz) are associated with higher economic performance. This study contributes to the emergent literature on university business models and provides suggestions to policymakers to incorporate a business model typology in university evaluation programs.

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV2018

The Lean Startup Framework: Closing the Academic-Practitioner Divide

Marc Gruber

The lean startup framework is one of the most popular contributions in the practitioner-oriented entrepreneurship literature. This study seeks to generate new insights into how new ventures are started by describing the five main building blocks of the lean startup framework (business model, validated learning/customer development, minimum viable product, perseverance vs. pivoting, market-opportunity navigation), enriching the framework with existing research findings, and proposing promising research opportunities in a way that reduces the academic-practitioner divide. In so doing, we hope to enhance researchers' understanding of the startup process; provide knowledge for educators; and, ultimately, improve the startup process for practitioners.

SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC2020

Essays on the Role of Policy and Venture Financing in Clean Technology Innovation

Matthias David van den Heuvel

EPFL2022