and we, as natural-born bricoleurs, happily borrow from ideas that we deem appropriate as well as discard or ignore what we deem unhelpful.

Uncertainty and innovation are a duality.

Ponoko, a web-based platform for the manufacture of custom products.

The context of The Lean Entrepreneur is an iterative, customer-centric, data-informed business development approach in the face of market uncertainty.

shadow force: a core competency, operational excellence, or key differentiator internal to the business, which allows it to outperform the competition

this book is likely less than optimal for these market segments: Small-business founders who are starting companies for which there is already a known model—Typically these are the types of businesses found in malls: dry cleaners, retailers, franchises, and so forth. Lifestyle business owners—If you’ve already built your business and are generally

We are wrong before we are right. The very nature of learning presumes this to be so.

A lean startup is not ready to scale until the product itself is the best marketing tool.

Flow in lean circles means that manufacturing is pulled through the product development process so that each component is built only when demanded by the next step in the process.