The Lean PhD

Radically Improve the Efficiency, Quality and Impact of Your Research

Julian Kirchherr

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781350315327
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Guías de estudio
• Categoría: Guías de estudio

This book fundamentally challenges the way in which PhDs are currently pursued. It applies lean methodologies – which have been embraced by start-ups – to the doctoral research process. It explains how to apply techniques such as the minimal viable product (MVP) approach, rapid prototyping and pivoting to each stage, from choosing a topic to seeking feedback, in order to save time, make the process more efficient and demonstrate impact. Chapters are enriched with insights from PhD researchers, practical guidance on going lean and a wealth of empirical data which supports this new approach to postgraduate research. This inspiring text is a must-read for prospective and current PhD students who wish to accelerate their careers in academia and beyond.

1The PhD as a Start-up

This chapter explains:

•Why your PhD is a start-up

•Which lean principles are most relevant to your PhD start-up

•How to manage your energy instead of your time

▶ 1.1The PhD as a start-up

There is no definition of the term ‘start-up’ that any two entrepreneurs or investors agree on. Most would likely concede, though, that start-ups are firms that are (relatively) young which attempt to set something in motion.²⁰ Start-ups are increasingly popular among university graduates. Twenty-eight per cent of graduates from the Master of Business Administration (MBA) programme at the Stanford Graduate School of Business now seek jobs in start-ups, up from less than 20 per cent five years ago. Only traditional banks remain more popular, with 31 per cent of graduates choosing them for their further professional development.²¹ Meanwhile, in a recent piece for MarketWatch, journalist Catey Hill lists ‘academic’ among the ‘5 once-prestigious jobs that are now B-list’²² as fewer and fewer top talents are drawn into this sector.

However, while seemingly disparate from a perfunctory first sight, the PhD student (in the dusty world of academia) and the start-up entrepreneur (in the shiny offices of Silicon Valley) share many commonalities, as also pointed out by academic Patrick Dunleavy.²³

First, both the start-up entrepreneur and the PhD student launch endeavours that usually commence as one-man/one-woman shows, i.e. where the one running it is, at root, alone. Much has been written about loneliness among entrepreneurs in recent years. For instance, Jonathan Hefter, the founder of Neverware, a start-up that provides software to make old computers run like new ones, shared in a Business Insider feature that ‘starting Neverware […] was the most isolating experience of my life’.²⁴ Another feature, published by tech.co, hypothesized that being a start-up founder may be ‘the loneliest job in the world’.²⁵ Meanwhile, Dunleavy writes that ‘researchers are always, at root, alone’.²³ Doctoral education in the United Kingdom, in particular, embraces inde-pendent and self-directed study,²⁶ which can isolate the one pursuing it. Half of all PhD students report suffering from psychological distress these days.²⁷

Second, both the start-up entrepreneur and the PhD student must create something novel from scratch to succeed. The start-up entrepreneur needs to create an original business model that is able to disrupt and eventually outcompete the incumbents in the start-up’s target industry.²⁸ Meanwhile, the most essential require-ment for successfully completing a PhD is ‘the discovery of new knowledge’,²⁹ as the website of the University of Cambridge outlines. Similarly, the University of Warwick, also in the United Kingdom, states that ‘a thesis must constitute a substantial original contribution to knowledge’.³⁰ If the start-up only copies and pastes existing business models, it is unlikely to survive; the first-mover advantages of the incumbents will wipe it out in most instances. Similarly, the PhD student that does not create something novel during their PhD journey is certain to fail at any serious university.

Third, both the start-up entrepreneur and the PhD student can only draw upon limited resources for their endeavours. Indeed, there are multiple start-ups that are only funded at first by bootstrapping – with the initial budget taken from the founders’ limited savings and, possibly, their family and close friends. For instance, the start-up Litmus, which provides email designs and marketing tools, was launched in 2005 with only USD 800 chipped in by its three founders. The firm now has annual revenues of more than USD 6 million.^31,32 Meanwhile, many PhD students live close to or below the poverty line, as defined by their respective governments. For instance, one report found that between 15 and 20 per cent of PhD students in the social sciences and history in Germany live off less than USD 1,000 per month; the poverty line in Germany is at about USD 1,200 per month.³³ Life as an (early) start-up or PhD student can be about (financial) rags instead of riches.³⁴

Fourth, both the start-up entrepreneur and the PhD student face tremendous uncertainties. After all, both endeavours revolve around developing and executing novel ideas. These new ideas – by definition – are always a journey into the unknown³⁵ and are thus high-risk. The PhD may be a bit less risky than the start-up, though. Sixty per cent of traditional start-ups go bust,^36–38 while roughly 50 per cent of PhD students in the United States drop out, compared to 30 per cent in the United Kingdom.^39,40 However, both the entrepreneur and the PhD student are frequently required to hide the messy aspects of their journey that result from this uncertainty, possibly creating additional pressures.⁴¹ The venture capitalist demands a polished presentation to invest in a start-up, whereas, in the main, the professor does not want a PhD student that seems lost in the literature or data.

Fifth, there is one certainty that both the start-up entrepreneur and the PhD student share: there is a thorny journey ahead of them. Those running Dreamit, a start-up accelerator, write that ‘even founders who have multi-million dollar exits to their names […] face constant rejection with their current ventures’.⁴² After all, initially, only a few understand the novel idea pursued by the company. Otherwise the firm would have been founded a long time ago. Many PhD students can identify with this. Harsh criticism of their work by their supervisor(s) and assessors is the norm, and with more papers churned out than ever before⁴³ even B-journals (which are acceptable, but not particularly renowned) reject most papers submitted to them these days. For instance, one B-journal in my field rejects almost 70 per cent of all papers submitted to it.⁴⁴ Meanwhile, more than 92 per cent of all submissions to Nature are rejected.⁴⁵

Start-up entrepreneurs and PhD students both launch as one-person shows. Both must create something novel from scratch with limited resources. Both face an uncertain journey ahead of them with the only certainty being many obstacles along the way. Hence, the start-up and the PhD are remarkably similar undertakings. However, the success of an academic often seems a result of indi-vidual determination or mere luck, while successful start-ups increasingly share the same set of underlying principles. Indeed, some of those founding a start-up have developed a set of working principles in the past which help them to launch firms that become almost instantly successful. For instance, it took Dropbox seven months to get its first million users.⁴⁶ Meanwhile, Spotify hit its first million users only five months after its launch,⁴⁷ Instagram after only 2.5 months.⁴⁸ Given the various commonalities between start-up entrepreneurs and PhD students, PhD students may be able to learn much from the working principles of start-ups.

▶ 1.2Going lean

Start-ups come in all shapes and sizes. However, many now share a common underpinning: the lean start-up approach. Successful start-ups such as those we have already mentioned – Dropbox, Spotify and Instagram – as well as start-ups such as Wealthfront, an algorithm that manages your stock investments, or Aardvark, a social search engine recently acquired by Google, have built their businesses with lean methodologies.^49–51 And the dominance of lean methodologies continues to grow with organizations like Start-up Weekend now expanding to almost every larger city around the world. Start-up Weekend runs 54-hour events that create a business model prototype within this timeframe. The entire event is centred around the lean start-up approach, thus introducing hundreds of prospective entrepreneurs at a time to these principles.³⁷ Also, more than 25 universities around the world now teach lean methodologies to the next generation of entrepreneurs and an online programme on lean working principles is one of the most popular at Udacity, a start-up offering massive open online courses (MOOCs),³⁷ which itself deploys lean working principles for its growth.⁵² Indeed, there are only a few left in the start-up landscape that have not been influenced by the lean start-up approach.

The term ‘lean start-up’ was coined by entrepreneur Eric Ries in a blogpost in 2008.⁵³ It went mainstream after the publication of his 2011 book The Lean Startup which sold 100,000 copies,^54,55 and it was further popularized by the 2012 book The Startup Owner’s Manual by the entrepreneur and academic Steve Blank and entrepreneur Bob Dorf.⁵⁶ Whereas the lean start-up approach is mostly grounded in Ries’s book, the term gained so much momentum that a variety of users embraced it and amended it once it was applied. Thus, the term is now a buzzword that means many different things to different people – keeping Ries busy posting articles which attempt to further clarify his interpretation of the term.⁵⁷ This book is not attempting to comprehensively apply the lean start-up approach outlined by Ries. Rather, I took (my interpretation of) those ideas from Ries that I found most relevant to the academic context and then modified them, at times significantly, to suit it.

The three main ideas from the lean start-up approach particularly embraced in this book are the concept of a minimum viable product, rapid prototyping and end-user orientation:

•Minimum viable product. Academicians are infamous for their perfectionism, with the website insidehighered.com even devoting an entire subsection to this topic.⁵⁸ With many at the top of the academic ladder embracing perfectionism, more and more generations of perfectionist academicians are nurtured.⁵⁹ Meanwhile, those who advocate the concept of a minimum viable product (MVP) are fundamentally at odds with perfectionism. MVP adherents want to build a product that is not perfect, but ‘good enough’. This means that the product needs to entail its envisaged core features, but nothing else. (This already indicates that the paper route is the preferred format for the PhD approach I outline in this book; I further discuss this in Section 2.5.) MVP adherents attempt to build the MVP as fast as possible while deploying as few resources as possible.¹⁶

•Rapid prototyping. However, the ambition of those embracing the MVP concept is still to deliver a perfect product, and rapid prototyping is chosen as a means for achieving this. Rapid prototyping means that the MVP is exposed to its potential end users once completed, feedback is then collected from these users, the MVP is amended according to this feedback and it is then exposed again to the end users for additional feedback. Ries calls this a ‘build-measure-learn’ loop which continues until the end users wholeheartedly embrace the product developed. Again, this approach is at odds with the academy since its perfectionists are conditioned to only share their products – which can be a presentation for a conference, an academic paper or a thesis – with their peers (their primary end users) once these products are as polished as possible.

•End-user orientation. The MVP is what the lean start-up adherent produces first; rapid prototyping is how they improve it. The end user is why the lean start-up adherent undertakes this effort. Every action of the lean start-up proponent is ori-entated towards the end user. The difference between this end-user orientation of the lean start-up proponent and the orientation of the traditional academic can be stark, at least in some disciplines. Although grant funders increasingly pressure scholars to produce work with a societal end us...