From Problems Worth Solving to Solutions Worth Pursuing

Inside Eisenmann & Bernstein’s new HBS class on how founders can avoid the pitfalls that sink most startups.

Why Most Startups Really Fail

As many readers of Lessons know—whether from hard-fought startup battles, late nights with B-school case studies, or blunt chats with fellow founders—most startups don’t fail from sloppy execution. They fail because the market is too small. Too few customers care. And even when the need is real, the solution often falls flat against the competition.

Vitamins or Cures for Cancer?

Founders love to dream up clever products that don’t solve a “hair on fire” problem. The real question is always: is it just a vitamin—or a cure for cancer? Timing can make all the difference. Think Webvan vs. Uber Eats. Pets.com vs. Amazon. AltaVista vs. Google—and maybe now, Google vs. Perplexity.

A New Approach at HBS

This semester, Professors Tom Eisenmann and Shai Bernstein are running a new HBS class for second-year MBAs called “Ideation & Prototyping for Innovation” designed to help students avoid those classic pitfalls. It’s a two-hour weekly class that blends learning-by-doing with small-team collaboration. The case method will not be used in this class. Instead, the professors bring in entrepreneurs (grizzled veterans like me), product managers, software developers, and designers who enrich classroom discussions with firsthand, real-world experience.

The Frameworks Behind the Course

At the heart of the course is the Double Diamond Design framework: problem definition in the first half of the semester, solution development in the second. Each phase moves from wide exploration (divergence) to focused choices (convergence), reinforced by iteration and feedback loops.

Layered onto that are complementary approaches:

• Design Thinking — empathy, ethnography, prototyping, iteration

• Lean Startup — hypothesis testing, MVPs, avoiding waste

• Research-Driven Ideation — deep research and expert input to find promising problems

• Think Bigger — structured recombination of solutions, avoiding groupthink

• Meaning Making — connecting solutions to deeper human values

Together, these frameworks push students to balance customer insight with expert perspective, creativity with discipline, and breadth with focus.

From PWS to SWP

You can summarize the class as a journey from PWS (“Problem Worth Solving”) → SWP (“Solution Worth Pursuing”). It’s a deceptively simple formulation that captures the essence of entrepreneurial judgment. First, resist the lure of shiny ideas and do the hard work of finding a real, urgent customer pain point. Then comes the harder test: transforming that problem insight into a solution that is desirable, feasible, scalable, and viable.

Entrepreneurship, reframed this way, becomes less about luck and more about navigating a disciplined progression from discovery to pursuit.

Go Slow to Go Fast

Finally, Eisenmann and Bernstein are masters at teaching the wisdom of “Go slow to go fast.” In an age of AI, this lesson could not be more important. Today’s tools make it easy to build quickly, but speed without validation is a trap. Just because something can be built doesn’t mean it should be. By slowing down to test assumptions and sharpen solutions, founders set themselves up to accelerate with clarity and confidence when it matters most.

What’s Next

I look forward to sharing more inside knowledge from this class—as well as my own reflections—with readers of Lessons.

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