Informed Success: A Bibliography for Student Entrepreneurs

A practical guide to effective business model testing 7 out of 10 new products fail to deliver on expectations. Testing Business Ideas aims to reverse that statistic. In the tradition of Alex Osterwalder's global bestseller Business Model Generation, this practical guide contains a library of hands-on techniques for rapidly testing new business ideas. Testing Business Ideas explains how systematically testing business ideas dramatically reduces the risk and increases the likelihood of success for any new venture or business project. It builds on the internationally popular Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas by integrating Assumptions Mapping and other powerful lean startup-style experiments. Testing Business Ideas uses an engaging 4-color format to: Increase the success of any venture and decrease the risk of wasting time, money, and resources on bad ideas Close the knowledge gap between strategy and experimentation/validation Identify and test your key business assumptions with the Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas A definitive field guide to business model testing, this book features practical tips for making major decisions that are not based on intuition and guesses. Testing Business Ideas shows leaders how to encourage an experimentation mindset within their organization and make experimentation a continuous, repeatable process. 

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER "Sprint offers a transformative formula for testing ideas that works whether you're at a startup or a large organization. Within five days, you'll move from idea to prototype to decision, saving you and your team countless hours and countless dollars. A must read for entrepreneurs of all stripes." --Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup From three partners at Google Ventures, a unique five-day process for solving tough problems, proven at more than a hundred companies. Entrepreneurs and leaders face big questions every day: What's the most important place to focus your effort, and how do you start? What will your idea look like in real life? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure you have the right solution? Now there's a surefire way to answer these important questions: the sprint. Designer Jake Knapp created the five-day process at Google, where sprints were used on everything from Google Search to Google X. He joined Braden Kowitz and John Zeratsky at Google Ventures, and together they have completed more than a hundred sprints with companies in mobile, e-commerce, healthcare, finance, and more. A practical guide to answering critical business questions, Sprint is a book for teams of any size, from small startups to Fortune 100s, from teachers to nonprofits. It's for anyone with a big opportunity, problem, or idea who needs to get answers today.

Find ideas for your new next business, side hustle, or indie startup. FROM THE AMAZON BEST-SELLING AUTHOR Today every skill for building a product can be learnt online -- coding, design, marketing -- besides one: generating new product ideas. With this book, you will learn 17 actionable techniques for finding ideas to start your next profitable SaaS, physical, digital, services or content business. "The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas..." -- Linus Pauling, Nobel Prize laureate What will you learn from this book? Find ideas -- Discover actionable techniques to immediately find problems to build businesses around. Notice opportunities -- Learn the mental models that will help you to start noticing problems in the future and convert them into products later. Find niche markets -- Learn how to define the audiences that you'd enjoy serving and explore opportunities in their niches. Prioritize ideas -- Sort ideas with the biggest potential impact to fit your business and personal goals. What's inside? 17 actionable techniques for finding business problems through scientific research, web search analysis, market trends, your own experience, open data sets, unrelated industries, business model patterns, etc. 60+ examples of product ideas 6 printable PDF canvases for practicing the techniques No upsale, no fluff This book will benefit indie hackers building a bootstrapped business, entrepreneurs starting a lifestyle business, full-time employees exploring a side hustle, freelancers diversifying their income, or students looking for ideas for their school projects.

WALL STREET JOURNAL #1 Bestselling Business Book Based on the highly acclaimed NPR podcast,How I Built This with Guy Raz, this book offers priceless insights and inspiration from the world's top entrepreneurs on how to start, launch, and build a successful venture. Great ideas often come from a simple spark: A soccer player on the New Zealand national team notices all the unused wool his country produces and figures out a way to turn them into shoes (Allbirds). A former Buddhist monk decides the very best way to spread his mindfulness teachings is by launching an app (Headspace). A sandwich cart vendor finds a way to reuse leftover pita bread and turns it into a multimillion-dollar business (Stacy's Pita Chips).   Award-winning journalist and NPR host Guy Raz has interviewed more than 200 highly successful entrepreneurs to uncover amazing true stories like these. InHow I Built This, he shares tips for every entrepreneur's journey: from the early days of formulating your idea, to raising money and recruiting employees, to fending off competitors, to finally paying yourself a real salary. This is a must-read for anyone who has ever dreamed of starting their own business or wondered how trailblazing entrepreneurs made their own dreams a reality.

A new classic, recommended by leaders and media around the world In this bestselling book, authors Jeff Dyer (Innovation Capital and The Innovator's Method), Hal Gregersen (Questions Are the Answer), and Clayton M. Christensen (The Innovator's Dilemma, The Innovator's Solution, and How Will You Measure Your Life?) build on what we know about disruptive innovation to show how individuals can develop the skills necessary to move progressively from idea to impact. By identifying the winning behaviors of the world's best innovators--from leaders at Amazon and Apple to those at Google, Tesla, and Salesforce--Dyer, Gregersen, and Christensen outline five discovery skills that distinguish innovative entrepreneurs and executives from ordinary managers: associating, questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting. Through real-world stories, the authors show you how to evaluate and develop your own innovator's "DNA code," including advice for how you can use the five skills to generate ideas, collaborate with colleagues to implement them, and sharpen your organization's competitive edge by building innovation skills into its culture. This innovation advantage will translate into a premium in your company's stock price--an innovation premium--which is possible only by building the code for innovation right into your organization's people, processes, and guiding philosophies. This book shows you how. Now updated with a new preface and fresh examples, The Innovator's DNA is more than ever the essential resource for individuals, managers, and teams who want to strengthen their innovative prowess.

Learn to Innovate and Make Real Change In our era of disruption and possibility, there are so many great opportunities within your grasp; however, most smart and successful people miss out. Unfortunately, your capabilities are limited by the seven traps of path dependency, which cause you to repeat past decisions. These traps can limit you from seeing the potential of what could be. If you could overcome these traps, what could you accomplish? How much more successful could you be? Create the Future teaches you how to think disruptively, providing specific steps to create real innovation and change. This book combines Jeremy's high energy, provocative thinking with tactics that have been battle-tested through thousands of his team's projects advising leading innovators like Disney, Starbucks, Amex, IBM, Adidas, Google, and NASA. On top of all that, this is a double-sided book, paired with The Innovation Handbook, a revised edition of Jeremy's award-winning book, Exploiting Chaos.

Start strong with essential early-stage guidance from the VC perspective Startup Opportunities is the go-to guide for anyone with a great business idea. Whether it's your first business or your fifth, realistic assessment from the outset can save you a lot of time and money; why pour your heart and soul into a venture that is doomed to fail? Instead, position yourself to win from the very beginning. In this book, accomplished venture capitalists share their insight on startups and entrepreneurs: who will fail, who will succeed and why, and what you should do to give your business the very best shot at becoming a global success story. You'll learn how to evaluate your business with a critical eye, and how early customer development can be key in turning a good idea into a great opportunity. If you're serious about building a business that lasts, this book provides invaluable guidance that you really cannot miss. More than five million people will launch a business this year, and many of them will be great ideas--yet few will be around in five years, and even fewer in ten years. A great idea is not enough to build a successful business. You need to fortify your idea with the proper foundation, and a scaffolding of good planning and early action. This book shows you how. Assess your business's viability using the 10x Rule Learn when you can quit your day job--or not Take the key steps to making your business succeed Discover the opportunities worth selling everything for This expert author team has witnessed more than 30,000 pitches over two decades, and have participated in over 500 startup launches. Startup Opportunities gives you the benefit of their experience to help you start strong and stay strong.