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Top1. Introduction
Innovation is essential for achieving a competitive advantage in startups and established companies (Crossan and Apaydin, 2010; Foss and Saebi, 2018; Lichtenthaler, 2018b; Memon and Meyer, 2017; Zaiane and Ben-Moussa, 2018). From a strategic perspective, entrepreneurs and existing firms share the goal of gaining and sustaining a high level of competitiveness. For entrepreneurs, the focus may be on identifying a profitable business model, securing the first customers, establishing effective structures and managing growth (Branzei and Vertinsky, 2006; Galli, 2018b; Kaoud, 2017; Priem et al., 2012). For executives in established firms, the focus may be on continuously developing new solutions, satisfying existing customers, overcoming organizational barriers and fostering an internal entrepreneurial orientation in large organizations (Galli, 2018a; Krimpmann and Stühmeier, 2017; Lichtenthaler, 2018a; Swift, 2018; Wei et al., 2018). Despite this slightly different strategic emphasis, startups and established companies therefore share the need for proficiently managing their innovation processes (Ahuja et al., 2008; Jia et al., 2018).
In the past, many companies focused on establishing a systematic process for managing innovation (Cooper, 1994; Schindlholzer et al., 2011). Here, the stage-gate model has become one of the most popular frameworks (Cooper and Sommer, 2018; Sethi and Iqbal, 2008). In addition, many firms placed strong emphasis on long-term strategic planning, operational efficiency analyses and related approaches (Calantone et al., 2003; Grönlund et al., 2010). In recent years, many of these approaches have been criticized in light of a growing dynamism and uncertainty in the external environment of many industries (Denning, 2018; Doz and Kosonen, 2010). In particular, traditional approaches are considered to offer insufficient agility and flexibility under such conditions. To overcome the limitations of these traditional approaches, many firms have turned their attention to new approaches, which facilitate higher levels of agility, flexibility and customer orientation (Cooper and Sommer, 2018; Wilson and Doz, 2011).
In this regard, two approaches have become particularly popular in firms from many industries: design thinking and lean startup (Lewrick et al., 2018; Ries, 2011). These approaches are used by entrepreneurs and startups in order to generate promising ideas and concepts and to shorten the development cycles of their first products (Liedtka, 2015). In a similar vein, established companies strongly rely on these frameworks either as an alternative to their established innovation processes or as an adaptation of their existing processes (Tura et al. 2017). Overall, design thinking and lean startup may contribute to the agility of innovation processes. Although these approaches involve major managerial challenges, the experiences of many companies are quite favorable (Liedtka, 2015). In turn, these positive experiences further contribute to the growing popularity of the approaches.