Empirical study on 20 hardware startup cases, which is preliminary presented in ESEM conference 2018, Oulu, Finland

1. University of South Eastern Norway
A preliminary study of agility in
business and production –
Cases of early-stage hardware
startups
Anh Nguyen-Duc
Letizia Jaccheri
Pekka Abrahamsson

2. University of South Eastern Norway
Agenda
• Motivation
• Research approach
• Preliminary results
• Discussion

3. University of South Eastern Norway
Motivation
3
Startup companies are unique:
• Little or no operating history
• Limited resources
• Multiple influences
• Dynamic technologies and markets
• Scalable business model
Many early-stage problems in startups relate to engineering
activities

4. University of South Eastern Norway
Motivation
• Hardware-related product development is becoming more
similar to software development in startup context
–value propositions basing on comprehensive systems of
both software and hardware components
–advancement in hardware prototyping and manufacturing
• Limited knowledge about the development of such hardware-
related product in startup context

5. University of South Eastern Norway
Hardware startups
Hardware and software as
a value proposition
Scalable business model
Entrepreneurial team
Lightweight processes
and practices

6. University of South Eastern Norway
Research Questions
characteristics of early-stage hardware-related product
development and how they are aligned with business
development
• RQ1: What does Agility mean to hardware startups?
• RQ2: How do hardware startups achieve Agility in early stage
product development?

7. University of South Eastern Norway
Case studies
• Semi-structured interviews
• 20 hardware startups from Norway (60%), Finland (15%), Pakistan
(15%), Netherland (5%) and Italy (5%)
– Personal tracking devices: patient monitoring, muscle operation measure.
– Machine interaction devices: smart board, smart home solutions, wheel chair
controller.
– Utilities: camera, and camera’s accessories, interactive toys, noise cancelling.
– Industrial IoT application: aerospace utilities, aquaculture tracking systems, ship
tracking.

8. University of South Eastern Norway
RQ1: What does Agile mean to hardware startups?
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
Have no idea about Agile
methodologies
Know about Agile but do
not use
Adopt some Agile
practices
Strictly follow some Agile
frameworks
No. of Startups
No. of Startups

9. University of South Eastern Norway
RQ1: What does Agile mean to hardware startups?
Kanban board
Sprint planning
Product Owner
Weekly meeting
Frequent delivery
Continuous Integration
Team collaboration
Less upfront planning
Changing features
Rapid prototyping
Full control of processes
Business pivot
Prototyping
Product development
Scope Principles Practices

10. University of South Eastern Norway
RQ1: What does Agile mean to hardware startups?
• It is difficult to fit the way of working of hardware startups into existing
Agile methodologies
• It is a mixed of business and engineering when mentioning about Agility

11. University of South Eastern Norway
RQ2: How do hardware startups achieve Agility in
early stage product development?
EnablingAgility
Strategic management
Inter-personal Practices
Artifacts
Resources

12. University of South Eastern Norway
Thank you !

13. University of South Eastern Norway
RQ2: How do hardware startups achieve Agility in
early stage product development?
• From the start we have been very early with testing and iterating on solution, long
before it was a finished prototype, so we used “gaffateip” and held it together to
test it to find out what features are working and not
• We are an early startup with lots of prototype testing and pilot customers, you can
not plan much more than two weeks ahead of time.
• The cheaper printers make rough surfaces that will not be approved for medical
use. This is a thing we otherwise would have to order from someone else, but that
would take 3 weeks, so we removed it and invested in the better printer for our
mechanical development

14. University of South Eastern Norway
Discussions
• “…agility has been part of manufacturing, which is related to hardware
development, from much longer…”
• “… one would expect an investigation on how software startups would
learn with hardware startups …”
• “ … how hardware startups eventually deal with particular agile practices
potentially challenging in the Software Engineering field…”