Creating minimum viable products in industry-academia collaborations

Abstract

Customer value determines how products and services succeed in the marketplace. Early assessment of customer value is important for software startups, spin-off companies, and new product development in existing companies. Software technology often influences customer value and typically defines the main competitive advantage in both entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial settings. Value-related feedback from real customers is needed during software development and maintenance, and decision-making should be increasingly based on empirical evidence acquired through experiments. Getting such value-related feedback usually requires a so-called minimum viable product (MVP), i.e., an artefact that may be incomplete in functionality or quality, but displays characteristics that allows determining its customer value. In this article we report on a case study which used industry-academia collaboration for creating such an MVP. Our goal was to identify strengths and weaknesses of such an approach to creating MVPs while providing practical recommendations for improvement. The process followed in the case study was found to be very suitable for creating MVPs, reducing company-specific risks when testing customer-value, and advancing university education.