Steve Blank's first bestseller, The Four Steps to the Epiphany launched the Lean Startup movement and outlined the Customer Development process at the heart of his The Lean Startup movement (Eric Ries was a student of Blank's at Stanford). Blank's next bestseller, The Startup Owner's Manual, created the step-by-step guide to disruptive innovation at startup companies. The Corporate Survival Manual explains how to apply these same Lean Startup concepts in existing companies, whether large or small.

For over 100 years, companies typically have grown by writing business plans, trying to guesss what customers want, and executing business plans. But Blank's research proved that the business planning methods used by big companies were useless for innovators. After all how can a new division with no customers know and build what those customers want?

The Corporate Survival Manual outlines a clear three-step process used by GE, Qualcomm, Intuit, and literally thousands of startups and existing big and small companies to drive disruptive innovation and deliver sustained revenue growth:


Step one: search for a scalable, compelling business model. Existing companies focus on relentless execution based on "knowns" in existing markets including target customers and their preferences, as well as known competitors and channels. Innovators commit instead to a structured, aggressive non-linear search for scalable new business models that determine what their customers want and how they want to buy it.
Step two: design a business model. The Customer Development process begins by crafting a business model for the new venture--a nine-box diagram outlining all key elements of the business, ranging from the product itself to its ideal target customers, and hypothesizing why, where, how and how profitably those customers will buy. The business model itself is merely a series of "best guesses" about the innovation. But the model drives the search to determine whether customers will enthusiastically support the new venture--all long before the product is built or even fully designed.
Step Three use Customer Development to manage the search for the successful, scalable new business. The process tests and validates each business model component directly with customers, the only "votes" that matter. It deploys volumes of customer feedback to drive iterative product development in a flexible, agile way. The result: by the time the product is complete, the company has already tested and proven its business model, understands who its customers are, and why they'll buy, As a result, Customer Development "derisks" innovation by reducing upfront spending until the company is confident it's funding a new product or service customers clearly want.