User:Kirstiscott/sandbox

--Kirstiscott (talk) 03:53, 30 January 2014 (UTC) "Venture Design" is a set of educational materials for creating new products and businesses, formally introduced in 2012 by Alex Cowan. Following his work as an entrepreneur and intrapreneur, Cowan created the methodology to provide a practical means of deploying best practice techniques in an integrated, coherent fashion.

Conceived in 2009 as part of his advisory work with new ventures, the methodology is now formalized in Cowan's website, workshop materials, and book.

Background
Cowan developed the concepts in Venture Design through his work as a manager, founder, and advisor. Having founded software company Leonid Systems in 2007, he increasingly took calls from friends thinking about pursuing startup ideas related to new software or services. Entrepreneurs had access to powerful ideas—design thinking, customer development, Lean Startup, agile, business model canvas—but had trouble organizing and mastering these in support of their projects given the amount of time available and enormity of things to be done.

Cowan began organizing a practical approach for these perspective entrepreneurs over email, eventually leading to the publication of his book (Starting a Tech Business) and the formulation of "Venture Design."

Venture Design
The material has five primary components, in addition to an organizing framework based on the agile development methodology.

1. Design Thinking The material leverages the foundation concepts from design thinking, specifically the use of personas, problem scenarios, alternatives and value propositions. It emphasizes validation of what target personas think, see, feel, and do. Instead of positing a value proposition, the framework encourages product designers to identify a problem scenario they believe to exist for the persona and the alternatives the persona currently uses to address said problem scenario. The venture designer's value propositions should be framed against the questions "Does this problem exist and is my value proposition better enough than the alternatives to warrant a purchase?" This question forms the basis for framing the venture's key assumptions.

2. Lean Startup Style Assumptions At the core of the material is the use of an empirical feedback loop, based on the Lean Startup Methodology. The material here describes approaches to maximize validated, actionable learning and to minimize expense and time spent.

3. Business Model Canvas The material uses Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas to describe and facilitate discussion of the venture’s business model.

4.User Stories & Test Cases The materials include the use of agile user stories as inputs to the creation of both product and promotional material.

5. Product & Promotion The material frames product and promotional materials as the changing exterior of a healthy Venture Design structure. The material describes techniques for linking product and promotional (marketing) executions to the rest of the structure.