Lean Startup (comment)

I'm about half way through Eric Ries' Lean Startup.
What surprised me the most is that those ideas mentioned so far are more or less a common sense.
"Start small, make falsifiable hypothesis, built to understand, cohort experiment, etc."
I have never took any formal business course so I don't know much about what Eric refers to as "traditional way of starting business." I'm a scientist by training and basically what he describes as lean startup approach is basically tradition way we are doing science. We look around to find interesting problem, we define the scope of our studies, we make hypothesis, we design experiment..make sure that have good experimental control..we analyze data..gain new body of knowledge about the world. We praise the gain of knowledge rather than the validity of initial hypothesis..etc. Although not formally stated, we are usually taught not to invest huge amount of time & money on a project at its initial phase. We start with a small pet project ..some thing that's kinda work. Once, we are good at it, then we move onto a larger scale and more complex problem. One of my research mentors once said "as you take a step, make sure to have your back foot on a firm ground." ..
Maybe what's new about lean start up is simply an argument that such traditional scientific approach could be applied to understand human behaviors, i.e., customer - product/service interaction. If that's the case, I'll be surprised that "traditional way of starting business " ever worked at all in the past. The more I think about it the more I feel that good scientists would like to be also good entrepreneurs. The problem with scientists starting business is that sometime they are too obsess with their areas of expertise and so fail to deliver what potential customers really want. Once they learn to look outside the lab..once they learn to listen to random people out there..any apply scientific approach to solve problems..in a scaleable fashion ...then they will be soon "in business."

9.45 pm 20 October 2012, Palo Alto