Innovation is an important driver of economic growth, however most established companies fail to constantly innovate and reinvent themselves besides incremental innovation. On the other side most new companies fail because they are not able to create a sustainable business model due to a lacking market for their product offer.

Lean Startup (LS) is an approach for the entrepreneurial process, combining existing approaches like Agile Development, Customer Development and Lean Thinking, that promises to overcome the main reason companies fail, i.e. building a product that nobody wants. Given the popularity and structured approach of LS, it could serve as the basis for an IT support of the entrepreneurial process. The goal of this thesis therefore is to build a foundation for such a support. Besides a literature research on the experimental approach of LS, the main contri- bution is to provide insights into the understand of LS among founders and how they try to implement various aspects of the entrepreneurial process that are relevant to LS. Out of those observations, the thesis provides design guidelines for an IT support of the entrepreneurial process.

Different research methods were applied to get a holistic view of the object of study. A brief literature research was conducted, followed by 11 semi-structured interviews with people involved with incubators, startup founders and a LS expert. Further to achieve a certain level of representativeness, an online survey amongst startup founders was conducted with 36 participants.

The results show that there is an ambiguous understanding of LS amongst founders ranging from a very broad interpretation of a mere mindset to a very strict interpretation of a clear process. This is resulting in a wide interpretation of ways to implement LS by founders. On a high level it is therefore difficult to distinguish the approaches of LS practitioners vs. Non-practitioners. Moreover, the results show that there is no need for a support specifically for applying LS. However, given the findings the focus was widened to the entrepreneurial process in general and three main areas of support were derived: 1) enable flexibility, 2) provide knowledge and 3) foster social exchange.

As a result of the findings 14 high-level design guidelines for a potential IT support of the entrepreneurial process are proposed. Additionally a research agenda for further research to develop the idea of IT support further is suggested.