
The First Mile
A Launch Manual for Getting Great Ideas into the Market
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
$0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Buy for $11.17
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Barry Abrams
-
By:
-
Scott D. Anthony
About this listen
You have a great idea. Now what?
That first mile - where an innovation moves from an idea on paper to the market - is often plagued by failure. In fact less than 1 percent of ideas launched by big companies end up having real impact. The ideas aren't the problem. It's the process.
The First Mile focuses on the critical moment when an innovator moves from planning to reality. It is a perilous place where hidden traps snare entrepreneurs, and roadblocks slow innovators inside large companies.
In this practical and enlightening manual, strategic adviser Scott Anthony equips innovators with new tools, questions, and examples to speed through this crucial early stage of innovation. You'll learn:
- How to evaluate your idea's strengths and weaknesses using the DEFT process - document, evaluate, focus, and test
- Fourteen recipes from an experiment cookbook to gain confidence in your idea or business
- Why spinouts, wrong turns, and other challenges commonly trip up innovation - and the practical strategies you can use to avoid them
- Why innovators need to seek chaos in an age of constant change - and other essential leadership skills
Drawing on his decade of experience as an innovation adviser and investor, Anthony describes hard-won lessons from disruptive start-ups and global giants alike. The First Mile will give you the knowledge and confidence to travel this perilous but ultimately promising terrain.
The first mile can be a scary place, but you don't have to traverse it alone. This book can help.
©2014 Harvard Business School Publishing (P)2016 Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...
-
The Soul-Sourced Entrepreneur
- An Unconventional Success Plan for the Highly Creative, Secretly Sensitive, and Wildly Ambitious
- By: Christine Kane
- Narrated by: Christine Kane
- Length: 7 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Can you succeed in business when your strength is more about sensitivity than swagger? If you’re moved by meaning, more than manipulation? In other words: Can you succeed while still being you? Christine Kane is living proof that the answer is yes. Far too many of us have swallowed the notion that business owners have to be a certain way to be successful - strategy-obsessed, data-driven, and relentlessly aggressive.
-
-
Amazing insight... a must for anyone setting out on a journey
- By Beth R on 12-04-20
By: Christine Kane
-
Why Startups Fail
- A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success
- By: Tom Eisenmann
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 10 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Shades of gray between startup failure and success
- By Greg Fisher on 04-04-21
By: Tom Eisenmann
-
The Harvard Business Review Entrepreneur's Handbook
- Everything You Need to Launch and Grow Your New Business
- By: Harvard Business Review
- Narrated by: William Sarris
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Whether you're imagining your new business to be the next big thing in Silicon Valley, a pivotal B2B provider, or an anchor in your local community, the Harvard Business Review Entrepreneur's Handbook is your essential resource for getting your company off the ground. Starting an independent new business is rife with both opportunity and risk. And as an entrepreneur, you're the one in charge: Your actions can make or break your business. You need to know the tried-and-true fundamentals - from writing a business plan to getting your first loan.
-
-
Business 101 as Told By a Robot
- By Amazon Customer on 09-01-22
-
Dual Transformation
- How to Reposition Today's Business While Creating the Future
- By: Scott D. Anthony, Clark G. Gilbert, Mark W. Johnson
- Narrated by: Chris Sorensen
- Length: 8 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Game-changing disruptions will likely unfold on your watch. Be ready. In Dual Transformation, Scott Anthony, Clark Gilbert, and Mark Johnson propose a practical and sustainable approach to one of the greatest challenges facing leaders today: transforming your business in the face of imminent disruption. Dual Transformation shows you how your company can come out of a market shift stronger and more profitable, because the threat of disruption is also the greatest opportunity a leadership team will ever face.
-
-
Getting Better in Business
- By David E. Doetsch on 07-29-20
By: Scott D. Anthony, and others
-
Running Lean (3rd Edition)
- Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works
- By: Ash Maurya
- Narrated by: Mike Lenz
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
We're building more products today than ever before, but most of them fail—not because we can't complete what we want to build, but because we waste time, money, and effort building the wrong product. What we need is a systematic process for quickly vetting product ideas and raising our odds of success. In this book, Ash Maurya takes you through an exacting strategy for achieving product/market fit for your fledgling venture. This new edition introduces the continuous innovation framework and follows one entrepreneur's journey from initial vision to a business model that works.
-
-
Practical Lean Startup Implementation
- By RyanB on 01-23-25
By: Ash Maurya
-
The Lean Startup
- How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
- By: Eric Ries
- Narrated by: Eric Ries
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.
-
-
Informative, mature but not original or essential
- By Jason Comely on 02-19-13
By: Eric Ries
-
The Soul-Sourced Entrepreneur
- An Unconventional Success Plan for the Highly Creative, Secretly Sensitive, and Wildly Ambitious
- By: Christine Kane
- Narrated by: Christine Kane
- Length: 7 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Can you succeed in business when your strength is more about sensitivity than swagger? If you’re moved by meaning, more than manipulation? In other words: Can you succeed while still being you? Christine Kane is living proof that the answer is yes. Far too many of us have swallowed the notion that business owners have to be a certain way to be successful - strategy-obsessed, data-driven, and relentlessly aggressive.
-
-
Amazing insight... a must for anyone setting out on a journey
- By Beth R on 12-04-20
By: Christine Kane
-
Why Startups Fail
- A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success
- By: Tom Eisenmann
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 10 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Shades of gray between startup failure and success
- By Greg Fisher on 04-04-21
By: Tom Eisenmann
-
The Harvard Business Review Entrepreneur's Handbook
- Everything You Need to Launch and Grow Your New Business
- By: Harvard Business Review
- Narrated by: William Sarris
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Whether you're imagining your new business to be the next big thing in Silicon Valley, a pivotal B2B provider, or an anchor in your local community, the Harvard Business Review Entrepreneur's Handbook is your essential resource for getting your company off the ground. Starting an independent new business is rife with both opportunity and risk. And as an entrepreneur, you're the one in charge: Your actions can make or break your business. You need to know the tried-and-true fundamentals - from writing a business plan to getting your first loan.
-
-
Business 101 as Told By a Robot
- By Amazon Customer on 09-01-22
-
Dual Transformation
- How to Reposition Today's Business While Creating the Future
- By: Scott D. Anthony, Clark G. Gilbert, Mark W. Johnson
- Narrated by: Chris Sorensen
- Length: 8 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Game-changing disruptions will likely unfold on your watch. Be ready. In Dual Transformation, Scott Anthony, Clark Gilbert, and Mark Johnson propose a practical and sustainable approach to one of the greatest challenges facing leaders today: transforming your business in the face of imminent disruption. Dual Transformation shows you how your company can come out of a market shift stronger and more profitable, because the threat of disruption is also the greatest opportunity a leadership team will ever face.
-
-
Getting Better in Business
- By David E. Doetsch on 07-29-20
By: Scott D. Anthony, and others
-
Running Lean (3rd Edition)
- Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works
- By: Ash Maurya
- Narrated by: Mike Lenz
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
We're building more products today than ever before, but most of them fail—not because we can't complete what we want to build, but because we waste time, money, and effort building the wrong product. What we need is a systematic process for quickly vetting product ideas and raising our odds of success. In this book, Ash Maurya takes you through an exacting strategy for achieving product/market fit for your fledgling venture. This new edition introduces the continuous innovation framework and follows one entrepreneur's journey from initial vision to a business model that works.
-
-
Practical Lean Startup Implementation
- By RyanB on 01-23-25
By: Ash Maurya
-
The Lean Startup
- How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
- By: Eric Ries
- Narrated by: Eric Ries
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.
-
-
Informative, mature but not original or essential
- By Jason Comely on 02-19-13
By: Eric Ries
-
Crossing the Chasm
- Marketing and Selling Technology Projects to Mainstream Customers
- By: Geoffrey A. Moore
- Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain
- Length: 9 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Here is the best-selling guide that created a new game plan for marketing in high-tech industries. Crossing the Chasm has become the bible for bringing cutting-edge products to progressively larger markets. This edition provides new insights into the realities of high-tech marketing, with special emphasis on the Internet. It's essential reading for anyone with a stake in the world's most exciting marketplace.
-
-
Outdated
- By Rebecca Savage on 01-05-15
-
Blitzscaling
- The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
- By: Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh, Bill Gates - foreword
- Narrated by: Chris Yeh, Reid Hoffman
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What entrepreneur or founder doesn't aspire to build the next Amazon, Facebook, or Airbnb? Yet those who actually manage to do so are exceedingly rare. So what separates the start-ups that get disrupted and disappear from the ones who grow to become global giants? The secret is blitzscaling: a set of techniques for scaling up at a dizzying pace that blows competitors out of the water.
-
-
not much here.
- By Francis Shanahan on 09-05-19
By: Reid Hoffman, and others
-
Great CEOs Are Lazy
- By: Jim Schleckser
- Narrated by: Jim Schleckser
- Length: 5 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
How do the really exceptional CEOs get more done in less time than everyone else? What is their technique for getting their work done, while still having the time to spend pursuing hobbies and spending quality time with their friends and family? The truth is that great and lazy CEOs know a secret when it comes to time management. Rather than spending a little time on a lot of things, the best CEOs spend most of their time eliminating the single biggest constraint to the growth of their business.
-
-
Loved It!
- By Mike E. on 07-10-19
By: Jim Schleckser
-
Competing Against Luck
- The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice
- By: Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall
- Narrated by: John Pruden
- Length: 7 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The foremost authority on innovation and growth presents a path-breaking book every company needs to transform innovation from a game of chance to one in which they develop products and services customers not only want to buy but are willing to pay premium prices for. How do companies know how to grow? How can they create products that they are sure customers want to buy? Can innovation be more than a game of hit and miss? Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen has the answer.
-
-
Understood from the first 5 min, the test was unnecessary
- By Julie on 11-02-18
By: Clayton M. Christensen, and others
-
Exponential Organizations
- New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (and What to Do About It)
- By: Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest, Michael S. Malone, and others
- Narrated by: Kevin Young
- Length: 11 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In business, performance is key. In performance, how you organize can be the key to growth. In the past five years, the business world has seen the birth of a new breed of company - the Exponential Organization - that has revolutionized how a company can accelerate its growth by using technology.
-
-
Not a revelation
- By A. Yoshida on 01-24-16
By: Salim Ismail, and others
-
Good Strategy/Bad Strategy
- The Difference and Why It Matters
- By: Richard Rumelt
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader. A good strategy is a specific and coherent response to - and approach for - overcoming the obstacles to progress. A good strategy works by harnessing and applying power where it will have the greatest effect. Yet, Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with “strategy”.
-
-
Good but thin
- By G. London on 01-04-20
By: Richard Rumelt
-
The Innovator's Solution
- Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth
- By: Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor
- Narrated by: Joel Leffert
- Length: 9 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Clayton M. Christensen is a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. Michael E. Raynor is a director at Deloitte Research. Together, they outline an innovative plan that urges businesses to create disruption rather than fleeing from it. Named one of 2003's Best Business Books by Business Week, this book is a Wall Street Journal and New York Times best seller.
-
-
Great Book...Drone Narration
- By Pat on 06-11-13
By: Clayton M. Christensen, and others
-
Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation
- By: Tim Brown
- Narrated by: Tim Roberts
- Length: 6 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The myth of innovation is that brilliant ideas leap fully formed from the minds of geniuses. The reality is that most innovations come from a process of rigorous examination through which great ideas are identified and developed before being realized as new offerings and capabilities. This is not a book by designers for designers; this is a book for creative leaders seeking to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization's products or service to drive new alternatives for business and society.
-
-
Starts strong, then becomes an Ideo advertisement
- By Cameron on 09-10-12
By: Tim Brown
-
The Innovator's Method
- Bringing the Lean Start-up into Your Organization
- By: Nathan Furr, Jeff Dyer
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Have you ever come up with an idea for a new product or service, but didn't take any action because you thought it would be too risky? Or at work, have you had what you thought could be a big idea for your company - perhaps changing the way you develop or distribute a product, provide customer service, or hire and train your employees? If you have, but you haven't known how to take the next step, you need to understand what the authors call the innovator's method.
-
-
Great mix of methods
- By björn on 11-22-16
By: Nathan Furr, and others
-
Designing for Growth
- A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managers
- By: Jeanne Liedtka, Tim Ogilvie
- Narrated by: Nicol Zanzarella
- Length: 6 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie educate listeners on one of the hottest trends in business development: "design thinking", or the ability to turn abstract ideas into practical applications for maximal business growth. Jeanne Liedtka's recent book, The Catalyst: How YOU Can Lead Extraordinary Growth, was named a Top Innovation and Design Thinking Book by Business Week. Tim Ogilvie has been hailed as a visionary for his pioneering contributions to service innovation, business model innovation, and customer experience design.
-
-
Audiobook requires regular book
- By GoingGoingGone... on 07-01-18
By: Jeanne Liedtka, and others
-
Nail It Then Scale It
- The Entrepreneur's Guide to Creating and Managing Breakthrough Innovation
- By: Nathan Furr, Paul Ahlstrom
- Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain
- Length: 9 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs, the "nail it then scale it" method is based on pattern recognition of the timeless principles and key practices used by successful entrepreneurs to repeatedly innovate. These processes and principles have now been distilled into a handbook to guide entrepreneurs and innovative product managers to victory. Stop following conventional wisdom, and join the few entrepreneurs that can consistently take their innovative idea all the way to a successful company launch.
-
-
A step-by-step plan to succeed as an entrepreneur
- By Amazon Customer on 11-16-15
By: Nathan Furr, and others
-
Between the World and Me
- By: Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Narrated by: Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Length: 3 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race”, a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of Black women and men - bodies exploited through slavery and segregation and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a Black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son.
-
-
A Heartfelt Self-aware Literary Masterpiece
- By T Spencer on 07-30-15
By: Ta-Nehisi Coates