Entrepreneurship in the Wild: A Startup Field Guide

A learn-by-doing guide to developing, testing, and pitching a startup idea, balancing a pragmatic approach and rigorous academic content.

This innovative book offers a learn-by-doing guide to entrepreneurship that balances practical advice with rigorous academic content. It introduces important concepts, provides highly engaging examples, and supplies the tools needed to put lessons into practice, creating a research-supported, step-by-step reference for developing, testing, and pitching any startup idea. By integrating lean startup principles, design thinking, and elements of the jobs-to-be-done framework, this combination textbook-workbook allows readers to choose for themselves whether, or to what extent, to engage with theory.

All of the book’s ten chapters encourage hands-on effort, providing readers with easy-to-follow steps, calls to action, and attainable milestones. Aspiring entrepreneurs will find this systematic approach to be more efficient than haphazard trial and error, and much more likely to yield concrete results. Chapters begin with a mini case, offering real-world examples of each step in the process. These cases–all featuring entrepreneurs working outside the Silicon Valley bubble–include a meadery operator that turned customers into advocates by designing compelling experiences and the development of a dating app for dog lovers that found a unique niche in a crowded market.

Throughout, readers are immersed in the activity of starting a business, guided not only through the successful development of a startup but also to an understanding of the principles underlying entrepreneurship. The book can be used as a text in undergraduate and graduate classes and as a reference by entrepreneurs and innovators.