How social entrepreneurs can use lean startup principles for better impact

credit: National Environmental Education Week

Launching a new enterprise has always been a hit-or-miss proposition. But recently an important countervailing force has emerged, one that can make the process of starting a company less risky. It is a method called the"lean start-up," and it favors experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition, and iterative design over traditional "big design up front" development.

The lean approach offers a practical tips and creative organizational mindsets for rapid learning and prototyping.
The early approach to many social enterprises was "Plan, Fund, Do." Instead, the lean start up mantra of "Build, Measure, Learn," encourages founders to conduct small experiments, quickly get real-world feedback on them, and use that data to expand only on what works.

The organizations have leveraged three core lean principle 1) fail fast, learn fast 2) agile development and 3)efficient innovation via clear and aligned metrics.

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