The Role of Iteration in Innovative Search

Sourobh Ghosh, Andy WuHarvard Business School"Lean Startups and Innovation Strategy”5 August 2017

Outline

An Intellectual Forebear to Lean Startup: Agile

Iteration in Innovation/Search Theory

Field Experiment: A Hackathon

Results

Next steps

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Antecedents to Lean Startup in Agile Methodology

Agile developed as a set of lightweight software development methods to respond to dynamic, rapidly changing markets

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Iteration in Innovation/Search Theory

Design iteration popular topic for the OM literature, with main goal to reduce development time

Work on organizational learning and adaptation has studied the competing tensions of local vs. distant search (Levinthal1997, Rivkin and Siggelkow 2003)

How does iteration influence entrepreneurial search efforts?

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Iteration in Innovation/Search Theory (cont.)

Rapid iteration has potential to incur costs due to learning from noisy feedback (Hart and Levinthal 2012) or benefits from to rapid coupled learning (Puranam and Swamy 2015)

Hypothesis: Increasing frequency of iteration subjects entrepreneurial organizations to local search, increasing productivty while decreasing bandwidth for broader search

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Empirical Setting: Software Hackathon

One day app development hackathon with Google

Treatment: stand-up meeting with Google mentor

Control: null interaction with Google mentor

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Next Steps

Contextualizing search measures in Git

Measuring complexity of code bases

Measures of quality, testing behavior

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