This False Belief is Killing Innovation

Most people think innovation is inherently risky and messy. That’s understandable when you consider that about 50-90% of new products fail. And yet, studies have repeatedly shown that the primary reason for high failure rates is misunderstanding the customers’ needs. Some experts claim that 90% of all new businesses fail because they couldn’t get anyone to buy, i.e., misunderstanding customers’ needs. That suggests that high failure rates are not due to innovation itself being inherently risky and messy. Rather, the way most organizations are going about understanding their target customers’ needs is risky and messy.

I have seen this hundreds of times and it still pains me because it doesn’t have to be that way; this is a fixable problem. In fact, virtually any organization that knows what type of customer information to obtain, how to get it, and how to use it, can flip the script, change the game, and achieve dramatically better results. The jobs-to-be-done innovation approach solves this problem. It also complements and enhances all other downstream innovation processes such as Design Thinking, Stage Gate, Lean, and Agile.

If you want to create compelling new value for your target customers, identify their compelling unmet needs.

Reveal needs. Create value. Drive growth.

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