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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Here are the star companies that have succeeded in their corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs. The companies were gathered by Civic 50, a national initiative to survey and rank S&P 500 corporations on how they engage with the communities they serve and utilize best practices in their corporate cultures.