Pet empires: Combining design thinking, lean startup and agile to learn from failure and develop a successful game in an undergraduate environment

Abstract

Startups are able to produce software products with a strong impact on the market, significantly contribution to the global economy. However, eight of ten software startups fail within their first three years - the main failure is caused by the high cost of getting the first customer and the even higher cost of getting the product wrong. In order to reduce these failures, more recent research has focused on combining the approaches of Design Thinking (DT), Lean Startup and Agile to develop and scale new products. This research aims to offer new insights on how startups can benefit by combing the approaches above to developing new software products. As a result, this paper provides a model which demonstrated good potential to be used by startups.