There’s no surefire strategy for building a thriving start-up. Entrepreneurs have launched successful businesses using frameworks like the Business Model Canvas, the Balanced Scorecard, and more. But in a recent study involving young ventures in Europe, one technique consistently boosted performance. Firms employing the scientific method—the centuries-old discipline of formulating, testing, and tweaking hypotheses—generated more revenue than companies in a control group did and were more likely to pivot away from unviable ideas, a routine necessity for early-stage start-ups. And among the top revenue generators in the experiment, the differences were especially pronounced. Among the top 25%, start-ups using the scientific method generated €28,000 more than the control companies did over the course of the experiment, on average, and among the top 5%, they made €492,000 more.
Why Entrepreneurs Should Think Like Scientists
In a recent study of European start-ups, one technique consistently boosted performance: the scientific method, a centuries-old discipline of formulating, testing, and tweaking hypotheses. Ventures employing it generated more revenues than those that didn’t and were also more likely to pivot away from unviable ideas, a necessity for early-stage firms.
The key to pivoting is focusing not on your ideas but on the answers to your experiments, which should provide insight into customer demand and industry pain points. That approach helped Osense, a start-up focused on technology for tracking carbon emissions, find its successful model. Its first idea was for peer-to-peer product rentals, and its second was for a platform for renting e-vehicles. If it hadn’t applied the scientific method, “we would have ended up with a product that wasn’t viable,” says cofounder Cosimo Cecchini.
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