Linking Strategic with Operational Efficiency: Lesson Learnt from Lean Startup Strategies

The chapter enters the realm of the Swedish entrepreneurial ecosystem to focus on the capabilities developed at firm level, within individual startups. Centering itself in an embedded case of a Gothenburg-based upstarter, the study focuses on its lean-related capabilities and their utilization for the transforming of unoptimized resources into tangible market value. This case-firm followed a typical lean startup thinking mode, often hard to articulate in larger organizations, kick-starting a business concept firstly with the customers in mind, however, with a problem-solving orientation toward resource-(in)efficiency/waste management/asset development. The results unraveled a scenario of contextual ambidexterity. The case-firm developed marketing capabilities (rather than lean capabilities) associated with new product development by exploring other firm’s resource-ineffective practices to envision a digital solution that streamlines a particular business process (of managing a pool of graduates) in an automatized manner. Dichotomically, as the focal firm did not develop, internally, in-depth lean-related capabilities distinctively from other startups in their ecosystem, instead, instrumentalized specific resource inefficiencies of other actors to develop a “lean pilot” market opportunity experiment through a combined formula of an agile software/app with customer-centric lean principles that constitute a noteworthy case of ideation for other aspirants to the role of entrepreneur to potentially replicate such business innovation model in other geographical spheres and economic sectors.