A Fast Company top ten business book for 2016.
For many companies, innovation is still hit or miss. They spend millions compiling the data to figure out what their customers want, but they often achieve only modest incremental innovations while completely missing the mark on the breakthrough innovations critical to long-term sustainable growth.
In Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice, Innosight’s cofounder Clay Christensen and senior partner David Duncan and their coauthors offer a game-changing look at how companies can develop and market products and services that customers actually want and need.
The answer, they say, can be found in the “jobs to be done” theory of innovation. This approach provides a powerful way to understand the causal mechanism of customer behavior, and that’s the most fundamental driver of innovation success.
Jobs to be done is based on this insight: When we buy a product, we essentially “hire” it to make progress and get a job done. If it does the job well, we hire that same product again. If the product does a crummy job, we “fire” it and look around for something else. When companies truly understand what job their customer is hiring their product or service to do, they can see far beyond existing solutions and customers. Look at companies like Amazon, Uber, and Airbnb, who don’t just jump on fleeting trends or roll out another new flavor to boost sales. “They were conceived, developed, and launched into the market with a clear understanding of how these products would help consumers make the progress they were struggling to achieve.”
LEADERSHIP AGENDA
Explore how organizations can use jobs to be done to create a customer-centric mission and culture.
The book explores how innovators can use jobs to be done to:
- Transform how you define what business you are in and who your competitors are
- Provide clarity into why customers hire, and why they fire, products
- Open up new avenues for growth by identifying opportunities to create powerful new solutions for your customers
- Transform your market research efforts by helping you to understand not only current customers but also nonconsumers
- Build a culture that’s unified around a customer-centric mission