A preliminary study of agility in business and production - Cases of early-stage hardware startups

[Context]Advancement in technologies, popularity of small-batch manufacturing and the recent trend of investing in hardware startups are among the factors leading to the rise of hardware startups nowadays. It is essential for hardware startups to be not only agile to develop their business but also efficient to develop the right products. [Objective] We investigate how hardware startups achieve agility when developing their products in early stages. [Methods] A qualitative research is conducted with data from 20 hardware startups. [Result] Preliminary results show that agile development is known to hardware entrepreneurs, however it is adopted limitedly. We also found tactics in four domains (1) strategy, (2) personnel, (3) artifact and (4) resource that enable hardware startups agile in their early stage business and product development. [Conclusions] Agile methodologies should be adopted with the consideration of specific features of hardware development, such as up-front design and vendor dependencies.