How customer-centric is the venture creation process of startups?

Abstract or Introduction

This master thesis qualitatively and quantitatively investigates the customer centricity of startups within their process from the idea to the foundation until the scaling of their business, which is called the venture creation process. In order to make customer centricity tangible, it is analyzed weather the new ideation and development methods Lean Startup and Design Thinking are used from startups and whether and how they help to improve their customer centricity. For the startups, the focus lies on the ones that received professional support for their founding process through a support program. Therefore, the theoretical part of the thesis analyzes the venture creation process, explains the basic theory models of Design Thinking and Lean Startup and delineates the startup support programs of incubator, accelerator and company builder. The empirical part of this thesis is based on a multiple case study, which qualitatively analyses the founding process of six startup support programs and quantitative explores 25 startups in their utilization of Design Thinking and Lean Startup. With this approach, a generic venture creation process is defined comprising a macro level of seven process steps and a micro level described by input, tasks and output. With the help of the findings from the startup analysis, this process is also extended to an own developed holistic framework for a customer-centered venture creation process. Therefore, it is analyzed that the utilization of Design Thinking and Lean Startup for a customer-centered approach in practice is given, albeit with two application mistakes: first customer orientation is defined one-dimensionally with a strong focus on competitors rather than customers themselves; and second, the methods are not used consistently and in a process-compliant manner. This thesis also offers directions for further research on customer centricity in the startup scene.