A Comparative Study on the Impact of Business Model Design &
Lean Startup Approach versus Traditional Business Plan on
Mobile Startups Performance
Antonio Ghezzi, Andrea Cavallaro, Andrea Rangone and Raffaello Balocco
Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering, Politecnico di Milano,
Via Lambruschini 4B, Milan, Italy
Keywords: Digital Business Model, Lean Startup Approach, IT Strategy.
Abstract: Business Model Design (BMD) & Lean Startup (LSA) approach are two widespread practices among
entrepreneurs, where many Mobile startups declare to adopt them. However, neither of the two frameworks
are well rooted in the academic literature; and few studies address the issue of whether they actually
outperform traditional approaches to new Mobile Startups creation. This study’s aim is to assesses the
contribution to performance of the combined use of BMD and LSA for two startups operating in the highly
dynamic Mobile Applications Industry; performances are then compared to those achieved by two Mobile
Star-ups adopting the traditional Business Plan approach. Findings reveal how the combined use of BMD and
LSA outperforms the traditional BP in the cases analyzed, thus constituting a promising methodology to
support Strategic Entrepreneurship.
1 INTRODUCTION
The process an entrepreneur faces in launching a new
venture is characterized by significant complexity
and uncertainty. Such uncertainty is the cause of the
intrinsic high risk that the creation of a new venture
embeds (Eisenmann et al., 2012); (Ries, 2011).
Studies have found that millions of would-be
entrepreneurs participate in new venture creation
every year, although there is large variation in startup
rates among countries (Amorós and Bosma, 2014). At
the same time, the large numbers of startup attempts
are matched by equally large numbers of failed
efforts: for instance, about 75% of U.S. venture-
backed startups fail, according to Harvard Business
School senior lecturer Shikhar Ghosh (Blank, 2013).
Nobel (Nobel, 2011) recently found that, irrespective
of what entrepreneurs define as success, the failure
rate increases as its definition narrows:
 whenever failure is considered in terms of asset
winding up, where investors lose part or the whole
investment made, the failure rate is between 30%
and 40%;
 assessing failure as a lack of return on
investments, the failure rate is higher and it stands
between 70% and 80%;
 finally, if failure reflects the non-achievement of
the targeted goals, the rate increases up to 90/95%.
The reasons behind these poor results are various, and
existing literature (Townsend, 2010) groups them in:
i) a lack of legitimacy; ii) a lack of resources; iii)
entrepreneur human capital; and iv) external factors
such as environment/industry characteristics.
Moreover, insights from the report for Canada’s
National Angel Capital Organization,
“Understanding the Disappearance of Early-stage and
Startup R&D Performing Firms”, tells much about
the gloomy picture surrounding early-stage startups,
show that the key factors attributed for the demise of
these companies were: no revenue from customers,
no input from customers on R&D performed or on the
product or service being developed, misreading of
markets, product not needed or not simple enough for
the application, poor sales and marketing decisions,
wrong timing, and unaware of competitors and
changing market conditions (Barber and Crelinsten,
2009). Notwithstanding the long list of mistakes that
determine poor performance and high Startup
mortality, the reported problems appear to
fundamentally point at a paramount issue:
entrepreneurial practices followed by entrepreneurs
196
Ghezzi A., Cavallaro A., Rangone A. and Balocco R..
A Comparative Study on the Impact of Business Model Design & Lean Startup Approach versus Traditional Business Plan on Mobile Startups
Performance.
DOI: 10.5220/0005337501960203
In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS-2015), pages 196-203
ISBN: 978-989-758-098-7
Copyright
c
 2015 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

are often unlinked with traditional strategic theory
and practices. Indeed, entrepreneurs tend to craft their
endeavors around an original business idea, and fully
devote their effort in pursuing its operational
concretization without a clear strategic orientation
(Kisfalvi, 2002); in addition to this, they tend not to
take stock of existing strategy analysis models, which
are seldom employed in the early phases of the new
venture activity (Ghezzi, 2013). Hence, strategy is
mistakenly perceived as an obscure tool by many
“startuppers”, and as a result, the relationship
between the original business idea, the new venture’s
goals, the actions to achieve such goals, and the
related performance, is often lost in translation (Kraus
and Kauranen, 2009). The research stream on
Strategic Entrepreneurship aims at tackling this issue
from an essentially theoretical standpoint, in the
attempt to supply entrepreneurs with top-down,
formal and sound tools to approach strategy.
Recently, however new bottom-up and rather
practitioner-oriented approaches emerged to
tentatively fill this shortcoming: in this study, we
focus on two approaches which are still under
investigated, due to their embryonic stage of
development (Trimi and Berbegal-Mirabent, 2012)
and their fuzzy definition (Zott et al., 2011), i.e. the
Business Model Design (BMD) and the Lean Startup
approach (LSA). The business model concept has
generally referred to “architecture of a business”
(Timmers, 1998) where the essence was defining how
the enterprise delivers value to customers, enticing
them to pay and converting the payments to profit
(Teece, 2010). The Lean Startup Approach has
achieved large consensus among practitioners, where
many startups declared to adopt this approach. The
term, coined by Eric Ries (Ries, 2011) refers to a
business approach that aims to change the way that
companies are built and new products are launched.
In this study, we propose to investigate the potential
contribution of BMD and LSA to strategic
entrepreneurship’s theory and practice. We first open
our work by arguing that these two practical
approaches show inherent relationships with the
legacy of both Strategic Management and
Entrepreneurship literature streams, and could be
positioned at the crossroad of the two: hence, we craft
a framework to organize and frame these emerging
approaches used in launching new ventures within the
strategic entrepreneurship literature stream – i.e., the
intersection between the entrepreneurship and
strategy streams – (e.g. Hitt, 2001). Such further
investigation is also in line with Audretsch et al.,
(2010) who state that several literature gaps exist in
the field of entrepreneurship and, as specifically
concerns new frontiers in entrepreneurship, an issue
(out of seven issues proposed) interesting to
investigate refers to the “mechanism underlying
processes of learning and innovation within and by
new ventures”. Second, at an empirical level, our
study aims at comparing the effectiveness of the
emerging BMD and LSA approaches with that of the
traditional Business Plan approach to support new
Information and Communication Technology (ICT)
ventures creation. By presenting and discussing four
longitudinal cases of startups development in the
Mobile industry, the performances achieved by two
startups created combining the emerging approaches
of BMD and LSA are benchmarked with the
performances of the two other new firms initially
developed adopting the traditional Business Plan
(BP) approach. An action research setting enabled
direct experience on the four cases, and the findings
allow to underscore the impact of the design approach
undertaken on achieved performance. Indeed, an
improved understanding of the approaches used by
entrepreneurs in creating new firms is critical to
explaining the survival and growth of new ventures.
The ultimate purpose of our work is hence to frame
BMD and LSA in the broader Strategic
Entrepreneurship field, and provide ICT
entrepreneurs with evidences that such combined
approaches may outperform the traditional BP and
make for improved performance.
2 THEORETICAL
BACKGROUND
2.1 Business Model Design
Research on BM design evolved from elaborating
taxonomies (e.g. Rappa, 2001), to defining a theory
(Osterwalder, 2004), to supporting firms’ strategy
analysis (Ghezzi, 2012). When analyzing BMs, the
researchers’ focus has shifted from a single firm to a
network of firms, gradually transforming the BM
from a monolithic entity to a multifaceted concept
(Ballon, 2008), to be investigated as a combination of
multiple and diverse design dimensions and
interrelations. Such multifaceted evolutionary
process, though beneficial to establish BM design as
a research stream, burdened the theory with a lack of
homogeneity (Johnson et al., 2008). In fact, several –
often heterogeneous – frameworks or templates have
been proposed to construct maps of BMs, to clarify
the processes underlying, and then to allow
considering alternative combinations of these
processes (also called building blocks or parameters).
While the impact of business models and their
AComparativeStudyontheImpactofBusinessModelDesign&LeanStartupApproachversusTraditionalBusinessPlan
onMobileStartupsPerformance
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innovation on a firm’s success appears to be
convincing (Cortimiglia et al., 2015), till now the
construct has been only very poorly understood
(Teece, 2010). Scholars, in fact, are still concerned
with the theoretical foundation and definition of BM
and the literature is developing largely in silos,
according to the phenomena of interest of the
respective researchers (Ghezzi, 2014). Nevertheless,
the framework proposed by Osterwalder and Pigneur
(2010) – the business model canvas - is now widely
adopted and employed by practitioners, and identifies
nine parameters to decompose a business model: (i)
value proposition; (ii) customer segments; (iii)
channels; (iv) customer interface; (v) key activities;
(vi) key resources; (vii) key partners; (viii) revenue
model; (ix) cost structure.
Although BMD design within the
entrepreneurship field is a recent topic, it is gaining a
growing attention in the literature (Trimi and
Berbegal-Mirabent, 2012; Ghezzi et al., 2013; Ghezzi
et al., 2015a). Performance of entrepreneurial firms is
strongly conditioned by their adopted business
models (Zott and Amit, 2007). However, new
ventures in rapidly changing environments change
their business models several times to succeed (Ries,
2011). Thus, business model design and change is
especially critical to new technology-based firms
(Andries and Debackere, 2007). Resulting from this
fuzzy environment, many startups fail, and a large
number of those that survive end up being acquired
by larger companies. In addition to adopting business
models to facilitate technological innovation and the
management of technology, firms can view the
business model itself as a subject of innovation
(
Mitchell and Coles, 2003). One of the main
developments in business model design regards the
business model canvas: such framework is widely
adopted and employed both by practitioners
(Osterwalder and Pigneur, 2010) and academics (e.g.,
see Chesbrough, 2010).
2.2 Lean Startup Approach
The LSA introduces two new concepts: minimum
viable products (MVP) that efficiently test business
model hypotheses, and pivots that change certain
business model elements in response to failed
hypotheses tests. As a third element, unlike other
methods for managing early stage venture, the lean
startup approach balances the strong direction that
comes from a founder’s vision with the need for
redirection that follows from market feedback
(Eisenmann et al., 2012).
One of the main differences between existing
companies and startups lies in the business model
issue: while existing firms execute a business model,
startups look for one (Blank, 2013). Such distinction
is at the heart of the lean startup approach. When
following this approach, an entrepreneur translates
her/his vision into falsifiable business model
hypotheses, and then tests those hypotheses using a
series of minimum viable products (MVPs). Each
MVP represents the smallest set of activities needed
to disprove a hypothesis (Eisenmann et al., 2012);
(Ries, 2011); (Blank, 2013).
Based on test feedback, an entrepreneur must
decide whether to persevere with her proposed
business model; pivot to a revised model that changes
some model elements while retaining others; or
simply perish, abandoning the new venture. He or she
repeats this process until all of the key business model
hypotheses have been validated through MVP tests.
A hypothesis-driven approach helps reduce the
biggest risk facing entrepreneurs: offering a product
that no one wants. Many startups fail because their
founders waste resources building and marketing
products before they have resolved business model
uncertainty. By bounding uncertainty before scaling,
the hypothesis-driven approach optimizes use of a
startup’s scarce resources (Eisenmann et al., 2012);
(Blank, 2013).
2.3 Business Plan
Kraus and Kauranen (Kraus and Kauranen, 2009)
state that business plan (BP) plays an important
linking role between entreprenership and strategic
management. The BP is the document which
describes the enterprise’s strategy, i.e. content and
process, thereby presenting the vision of the
enterprise and how the enterprise is going to attain its
vision (Honig and Karlsson, 2004). In particular, the
BP can serve as the basis of the strategy itself and as
its formalized documentation. The business plan
typically includes a set of key documents, organized
around the following sections (Abrams and Abrams,
2003):
 general description of the firm;
 general description of products/services;
 strategic plan;
 marketing plan;
 operating plan;
 human resources and organization plan;
 financial plan, and economic and financial
projections.
Several strategic tools and models have been
traditionally used to craft the BP The main ones are
the Abell’s model for the competitive positioning
(reference) and the SWOT (Strength-Weakness-
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Opportunity-Threat) analysis to generate strategic
alternatives. There is still no agreement in literature
about the usefulness of business planning and
empirical findings have been fragmented and
contradictory (Brinckmann et al., 2010); some
scholars (i.e. (Bhide, 2000)) argue that planning
interferes with the efforts of firm founders to
undertake more valuable firm. Notwithstanding such
theoretical disagreement, the business plan is the
document typically used by investors to evaluate
funding opportunities
(Burke et al., 2010).
3 METHODOLOGY
Since the thin archival record deposited by many
startups requires entrepreneurship researchers to “get
their hands dirty”, many entrepreneurship researchers
– even those without relevant prior experience – may
gain an understanding of practical issues through
direct research involvement in new ventures. Thus,
startups provide a useful laboratory for studying
many of the research questions central to strategy and
organization (Ireland and Webb, 2007). Taking
advantage of the authors’ direct experience within
two different masters courses offered in an EQUIS-
accredited School of Management, a selection of four
cases of Startups in the Mobile industry was made,
and these cases have been analyzed in-depth, in the
attempt to identify the difference from theory to
practice, and from what the companies claim they do
and what they actually do. The opportunity for cases
identification came from the involvement in two
master courses: an executive master in business
administration, whose target students is represented
by managers of large companies, which lasted two
years and it was held in 2011 and 2012; and a newly
designed master directly addressing new
entrepreneurs: the first edition of the course has been
launched in 2012. In the first, we took the role of
tutors responsible for leading participants in the
adoption of the traditional BP approach to assess
either strategic investments in well-established ICT
environments or original business ideas to start a new
venture. In the second course, we were tutors in a
newly designed master directly addressing new
entrepreneurs: the master was more open to new
approaches, as the business model canvas and the lean
startup approach were the heart of the teaching
activity, requiring startuppers
to develop their startups following these approaches.
The cases analyzed were selected according to the
following filters: (i) the case had to be related to an
actual startup, i.e. a new ventures launched before or
during the course; (ii) the case had to be focused on
the Mobile Industry; and (iii) the entrepreneurs had to
be willing to be led by the tutors in the actual strategic
process, openly sharing data and information. The
Mobile Industry was selected due to its
pervasiveness, global relevance, suitability to test
both the BP and the BMD-LSA approaches, and
market-specific expertise from the authors.
As a result, four cases were selected, where two
of them applied the traditional BP and two applied the
BMD-LSA. The target firms were all Mobile startups
focusing on mobile applications that were in the
launching phase: this is in line with the research
objectives and, according to Venkataraman (1997),
the level of analysis is constituted by new enterprise
itself. This allowed us to compare the results of the
analysis. Therefore we had the opportunity to study
and compare two different approaches used by new
ventures in their very early stage of life in the
dynamic context of the Mobile Industry. Table 1
reports the key data from the new ventures analyzed.
Table 1: The 4 Mobile startups analysed.
BMD+LSAAPPROACH
Startup:AppyU
MarketSegment:Couponing
Description:Appthatallowsfindingoffersanddiscountsinbarsand
cafeterias of Milan.Theuser has onlytodownloadtheapp on his
ownsmartphonetoobtaincouponswithdiscountsupto40%onthe
priceofbreakfasts,lunches,happyhoursordrinks.
Startup:Pinevent
MarketSegment:EventManagement
Description:Mobile App thatallows userstolook forand visualize
ICTBusinesseventsinItalyontheirownsmartphone(morethan500
workshops and conferences). It is possible to search for events
through keywords, sectors, geographic area, etc). Once the user
selectsanevent,
hecanseeallthedetails,shareitonsocialnetworks
andinsertitintheagenda.
BPAPPROACH
Startup:CallATaxi
MarketSegment:Transport
Description:MobileApp that allowstocalla taxidirectlyfrom the
smartphone,inaneasyandfastway.Oncethetaxihasbeencalled
the user can see the right position of the taxi and can know the
estimatedwaitingtime.Whentheuserreachthefinaldestinationhe
can pay with the smartphone, evaluates the taxi driver and lets a
commentaboutthetravel.
Startup:CryptoLAB
MarketSegment:Security(Counterfeiting)
Description: An anti‐counterfeiting service that enables
manufacturers to reduce the phenomenon of counterfeiting and
gray market for their products; it also allows the consumer to
independentlyverifytheauthenticityofaproductpriortopurchase.
Theverificationisperformedbyusingasmartphoneandcanbedone
either at the store or on the web. It is a computer system service
combinedwithaspecifictypeofproductlabels.
AComparativeStudyontheImpactofBusinessModelDesign&LeanStartupApproachversusTraditionalBusinessPlan
onMobileStartupsPerformance
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Because of the authors’ direct role in the
development of these startups, our research activity
conforms to the tenets of action research (AR).
Avison et al., (1999) define action research as an
iterative process involving researchers and
practitioners acting together on a particular cycle of
activities, including problem diagnosis, action
intervention, and reflective learning. AR is perhaps
the most widely discussed collaborative research
approach, and a significant amount of literature on
this topic is currently available (e.g. see Baskerville
and Wood-Harper, 1998).
Cuervo et al., (2007) hold that researchers who
want to make a unique and worthwhile contribution
to entrepreneurship research should seriously
consider making the effort to study new enterprise
efforts, although collecting this kind of data is far
from easy. New enterprise efforts would be studied
over time regardless of their organizational context
and their human champion both of which may change
over time.
4 EMPIRICAL RESULT
As seen throughout the literature review, there is a
broad spectrum of performance measures around
which new ventures are compared and evaluated.
Nonetheless, measuring the performance of new
ventures is problematic because there is no consensus
among researchers as to what constitutes
entrepreneurial success (Brush and Vanderwerf,
1992). Moreover, prior studies point out that
entrepreneurs have differing objectives for starting
new firms (e.g., “lifestyle ventures” versus
“gazelles”) and that objectives may vary in
importance at different stages in the entrepreneurial
process and in different industries. According to
Kakati (2003) most of the new venture researches
have focused on financial indexes, for instance by
taking ROI as a measure of new venture performance,
despite the pitfalls of using ROI (i.e. the firms would
not be expected to achieve break-even within the first
few years and ROI is sensitive to accounting
practices). Other researches focus also on market
share gain - but Miller et al. (1998) hold that this
measure may be problematic for pioneering ventures,
as they would initially have 100% of the market, only
to have this reduced as new firms entered - sales
growth and so on and so forth, mainly because of
being readily available, easy to measure and non-
confidential. Therefore, we tried to build a “vector of
performance” considering some of the parameters
presented in literature that are key in the startup
development process. We consider our approach to
measuring performance a viable – though possibly
imperfect – solution one to a very complex problem.
In sum, our set of performance measures is composed
by:
1. termination of the new venture (TNV);
2. product development (PD);
3. venture organization activity (VOA);
4. equity funding (EF);
5. first customer acquisition (FCA).
Shane and Delmar (2004) define termination of the
organizing effort as a decision to terminate the
endeavor made by all members of the venture team,
because venture teams are often quite fluid, leading a
venture to proceed with only part of the group that
initiated the effort. We decided to focus on TNV
because, as suggested by Shane and Delmar (2004),
continuation of the organizing effort is a necessary
condition for all other activities in new ventures. A
new venture can achieve no other performance goal
(achievement of first sale, positive profits, or the
acquisition of financing) if it has been terminated.
Our involvement as tutors in the startups’ team
allowed us to know immediately whether everyone
pursuing the venture has terminated, and if so, when.
We also took into account two other different
aspects of new venture development used by Delmar
and Shane (2003): PD, which they define as the
creation of the product or service that the venture will
sell; and VOA, which they define as the set of
activities to establish the organization that will
provide the new product or service. We measured
product development as the amount of time needed to
develop the first product or service delivered to the
market, while we measured venture organizing as the
time needed to set up those activities that establish the
physical structure and organizational processes of a
new firm (Bhave, 2004). The last variable takes into
account whether the startup has accomplished all the
different activities related to bureaucracy (e.g.
registration with government and tax authorities, the
obtainment of permits and licenses to operate) and to
both logistic and marketing issues (e.g. purchasing of
raw materials, equipment, facilities and marketing
and promotion activities). Then we also took into
account whether the startup has received financing
from any venture capital firm or not. The credibility
associated with a funding event gives a strong signal
about the quality of the startup. In a market with high
uncertainty, the relevance of this signal is likely to be
significant in reducing the perceived uncertainty of
being associated with a particular company (Davila et
al., 2003). Finally, we also monitored the time passed
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from the launch of first version of the product to the
first customer/external user acquired. We added this
variable because in the LSA customer feedback
constitutes a relevant part of the methodology.
Table 2 summarizes the different startups’
performances. The findings show how all the
performances achieved by startups following a BMD
+ LSA approach were superior than those achieved
(or not achieved) by those startups developed through
a BP.
Table 2: The comparative analysis of the 4 startups.
Approach Startup VOA TNV PD FCA EF
BMD
+
LSA
AppyU
3,5months
(completed)
No 3months 2weeks
Yes
(Seed)
Pinevent
2,5months
(completed)
No 4months 1week
Yes
(Seed)
BP
CallATaxi
9months
(completed)
No 8months
2
months
Yes
(Seed)
CryptoLAB
1,5year(not
yetcompleted)
No
1,5year
(notyet
completed)
No No
Apart from the performance comparison, during
the action research some other issues arose. During
the whole LSA it emerged that some resources and
competencies neglected by the entrepreneurial team
were, instead, “core resources” (meaning that they are
important in sustaining the competitive advantage of
the firm) (Gezzi et al., 2015b). Nonetheless, we also
noticed that the LSA fastened the “learning process”
of founders, pushing them in improving/acquiring
competencies and capabilities that are core in running
the new Business Model.
5 CONCLUSION
This paper provides two main contributions to the
existing knowledge. On the one hand, this study
frames in the academic literature two well-known
popular tools among practitioners: the Business
Model and the Lean Startup Approach. Our
theoretical framework show that BMD and LSA
should be included in the strategic entrepreneurship
literature field, since their founding elements are
linked with the strategic literature and the
entrepreneurship literature too. These findings
represent the first step to provide a robust theorization
of the two emerging concepts, to lay the basis for
rigorous empirical validation. Our study offers an
alternative approach to strategically drive the process
of entrepreneurial action, and supports the idea that
exists an “entrepreneurial method” analogous to the
scientific method (Sarasvathy and Venkataraman,
2011). Furthermore, the main theoretical contribution
of the BMD and the LSA to existing theories of
entrepreneurial action like Effectuation and
Bricolage, is to highlight the importance of
experimentation and to stress the learning aspect of
the entrepreneur during the journey of starting a
company. The need for a shift from simple business
planning to experimentation and learning has been
recently put forward by some studies (Brinckmann et
al., 2010), and this paper provides practical evidences
supporting this point of view. On the other hand, this
paper provides also some practical implications. The
main contribution lies in guiding practitioners
towards new approaches – appropriately rooted in the
theory - favoring the shift from the traditional
approach based on Business Planning, by now
obsolete in the turbulent ICT context, to the new
approach constituted by a combination of BMD and
LSA. In fact, Bhide (Bhide, 2000) argues that the
efficacy of written business plans is context specific:
it is likely to have a positive impact in more static and
predictable/stable markets but less so in more
uncertain markets where entrepreneurs are
introducing highly innovative products/services.
Moreover, the analysis we made makes us suggests
that in order to develop a new venture BMD and LSA
should come first; BP could be used as a second step,
to refine the previous methods’ outcome and better
frame the business idea in the competitive landscape.
This is particularly true in high turbulent environment
as in the Mobile industry. Hence, the ideal process
that starts with the business idea generation should
then continue with the design of a business model and
the application of the lean techniques. When the
business idea reaches the product/market fit, the new
entrepreneur could write the BP, and employ those
traditional strategic models she or he too often tend to
disregard. This study is not without limitations, which
mainly derive from any potential observer bias in the
action research activities: this is a shortcoming that
burdens qualitative research, though the rigorous
methodology employed (e.g. we followed all the 5
principles proposed by Davison et al., 2004) in order
to conduct a rigorous action research activity)
attenuates this limitation. Moreover, other limitations
refer to the need to generalize findings drawn from a
single industry, to the small sample size of startups
analyzed and to the selection of key performance to
evaluate. To conclude, our research outlines several
opportunities for future research; first, it pushes to
further investigate and enhance the theoretical roots
of BMD and, above all, LSA, so as to further justify
their positioning in the strategic entrepreneurship
AComparativeStudyontheImpactofBusinessModelDesign&LeanStartupApproachversusTraditionalBusinessPlan
onMobileStartupsPerformance
201

research stream. Secondly, future research efforts
could try to better understand the efficacy of BMD e
LSA in launching new ventures, and to investigate
how all the relationships between the BMD and LSA
change during the very early stage of life of the
Startups. Moreover, we pave the way to the
investigation of whether the simultaneous application
of the LSA and BMD in the early stage of a new firm
can help entrepreneurs in the exploration of new
opportunities. Other future research avenues should
try to overcome all this study’s limitations by
validating findings in different contexts and
analyzing larger samples for instance. Finally,
according to Kraus and Kauranen (Kraus and
Kauranen, 2009), one of the most promising areas for
future research is the pre-startup planning stage.
Strategic management of an enterprise before and
during the phase of its foundation is a topic of
increasing interest. This includes research on the role
of the business plan in the planning process, another
topic of growing academic interest.
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AComparativeStudyontheImpactofBusinessModelDesign&LeanStartupApproachversusTraditionalBusinessPlan
onMobileStartupsPerformance
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