As I wrote before, the idea of focusing my research on a method (Lean Startup) that could fade out in the following years bothered me. Of course, it is the nature of science to get dated: new theories are always developed to tackle the problems of the previous. If even the Newton’s mechanics was proved a simplification by Einstein’s relativistic mechanics, who am I? But I wanted to focus on something deeper than a method. And I found it still on my first year of PhD.

During my initial literature review, I found the paper “How do entrepreneurs think they create value? A scientific reflection of Eric Ries’ Lean Startup approach” by Frederiksen and Brem. The authors compare the Lean Startup ideas with concepts discussed in the scientific literature. And this paper opened my eyes to the concept of experimentation.

More than ten years before the publication of the Lean Startup book, researchers in the entrepreneurship and innovation fields were already talking about the concept of experimentation. It is related to the idea of taking your business ideas as hypotheses and perform experiments with them before commiting a lot of resources. In parallel, after the rise of Lean Startup, several researchers focused on experiments in software engineering, specially, A/B tests. So, it was clear to me that focusing on experimentation, rather than specifically in Lean Startup, would bring more interesting and valuable results.