I've posted earlier— Resources for creating entrepreneurs— on the great work by Steve Blank and, related, the Business Model Generation authors.  They continue to integrate and hone their message, and this new slide deck does a great job of communicating the core points:

1. No business plan survives first customer contact.

2. It's the business model, stupid.

3. Take time to think through the alternative possibilities.

4. A business model idea is just a set of hypotheses.

5. Don't build your company until you've verified your business model.

These are great points, articulated very well, and as appropriate in making the leap as in growing your startup effectively.  As is always the case, there is an iceberg underneath each of these points.  

There are three turning points in the life of a new business, pivot points which set its course and shape its fate.  These moments hold whether it’s a startup or a new business growing within an established company. These posts are about how to navigate the least visible but most critical of these moments.

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At the UC Davis Center for Entrepreneurship, we built our Entrepreneurship Academies on a simple observation, that the myth of the better mousetrap was undermining innovation. 

Recall Emerson's famous line: “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.” People are obsessed with building better mousetraps. For scientists, this creates a mindset in which the hard work lies in coming up with the idea—usually culminating in publishing a paper.  For the engineer, this usually means developing a design, or a model. For the would-be entrepreneur, or corporate innovator, this usually means an extensive excel spreadsheet or polished powerpoint description of the next great idea.  And for managers managing for “innovation,” to revive or maintain their business’s growth, this usually means searching for better ideas from inside the company, from among its customers, or from the larger “idea” marketplace. 

If I have learned anything while traveling the country, talking to people in companies about their innovation process, and working with scientists from around the globe, it is this: There is no shortage of good ideas. We are waist-deep in ideas, good and bad. We’ve just lost the ability to recognize them, separate the good from the bad, and throw ourselves into building the best ones into real businesses.

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