Ensuring Failure

If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.

Body area networks (BANs) are networks of wireless sensors and medical devices embedded in clothing, worn on or implanted in the body, and have the potential to revolutionize healthcare by enabling pervasive healthcare. However, due to their critical applications affecting human health, challenges arise when designing them to ensure they are safe for the user, sustainable without requiring frequent battery replacements and secure from interference and malicious attacks. This book lays the foundations of how BANs can be redesigned from a cyber-physical systems perspective (CPS) to overcome these issues. Introducing cutting-edge theoretical and practical techniques and taking into account the unique environment-coupled characteristics of BANs, the book examines how we can re-imagine the design of safe, secure and sustainable BANs. It features real-world case studies, suggestions for further investigation and project ideas, making it invaluable for anyone involved in pervasive and mobile healthcare, telemedicine, medical apps and other cyber-physical systems.

Vols. for 1889-1894, 1906-1912 issued with the Annual report of the Massachusetts Agricultural Experiment Station; vols. for 1895-1905 issued with the Annual report of the Hatch Environment Station of the Massachnusetts Agricultural College.