How to Create Winning New Ideas

Some people think that startup and new product/service ideas are worthless.

That may be true for most of the ideas that come out of traditional brainstorming sessions but there’s been tremendous progress made in our ability to consistently create high value ideas with the Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) process. Motorola, for example, licensed many of its JTBD-generated ideas in the fuel cell market for millions of dollars.

The problem with most new product ideas is that they are generated before the company really understands the market opportunities or knows what the best way to address those opportunities may be. That is, teams often generate ideas in a knowledge vacuum because they don’t know:

1. 1. How to define the market for innovation, i.e., a group of people plus the job they want to get done. If you don’t define your market this way – separate from products and services – you will unwittingly be confined to improving upon current product/service solutions.
   2. All the customers’ needs in the market, i.e., the jobs customers are trying to get done and the criteria they use to measure success
   3. Which needs are unmet, i.e, important and unsatisfied
   4. Which needs are attractive for the firm to pursue for new value creation
   5. The best way for the firm to pursue each selected opportunity, i.e., M&A, new offerings, messaging and positioning, or operational alignment

Without this information, most ideas are indeed worthless.

Historically, companies have only been able to obtain this market and company intelligence AFTER an idea has been generated. That’s is why so many people think ideas are worthless: because the valuable work hasn’t been done yet.

But now, using the Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) innovation approach, companies can obtain all this market and company intelligence BEFORE generating ideas and use it to guide and inform the creation of new winning concepts that addresses the top unmet needs in the market.

This is possible because we decouple customer needs from products are services and redefine them as the “jobs” customers are trying to get done and the criteria they use to measure success. This changes the game.

There are three basic tenets of JTBD that explain this:

1) People buy products and services to get their jobs done. By “job,” I don’t mean an HR job, I mean any problem to be solved or objective to be accomplished. When we have problems or objectives that arise in our lives, we look around for products or services to “hire,” if you will, to help us get those jobs done.

A good example of this is that famous quote by Theodore Levitt, who said that “People don’t want to buy a ¼” drill; they want a ¼” hole!”

This illustrates that customer needs are separate and distinct from product and service solutions. In the quote, the product solution is a drill but it could be a pick, a punch, a laser, or some yet-to-be-invented tool. Whatever the product or service solution may be, it’s separate and distinct from the true customer need that, at a high level, is a job to be done like “make a hole.” So, first, people buy products and services to get their jobs done and, at a high level, customer needs are the jobs they’re trying to get done.

2)  At a lower level, customer needs are the success criteria that customers use to determine how well a job is getting done and to determine how well a product or service is performing in helping them get the job done. Within the job of “making a hole,” for example, some success criteria include:

– Minimize the time it takes to determine where to make the hole

– Minimize the likelihood of cracking the plaster when making the hole

– Etc.

It’s not unusual to obtain 50 – 150 of these success criteria for one functional job.

Note that customers CAN tell us what they want if we ask them what functional, emotional, and social jobs they’re trying to get done and how they measure success rather than asking them for product or service specifications (although it does take some knowledge and skill to obtain this information).

3) By discovering the target customers’ JTBD and success criteria, and then determining which are important and unsatisfied (unmet), companies can consistently create winning new and improved offerings. That’s because now they can obtain all the necessary market and company intelligence BEFORE generating ideas and use it to devise winning ideas. With JTBD, the team will go into “focused brainstorming” knowing:

1. 1. 1. How to define the market for innovation, i.e., a group of people plus the job they want to get done
      2. All the customers’ needs in the market, i.e., the jobs customers are trying to get done and the criteria they use to measure success
      3. Which needs are unmet, i.e, important and unsatisfied
      4. Which needs are attractive for the firm to pursue for new value creation
      5. The best way for the firm to pursue each selected opportunity, i.e., M&A, new offerings, messaging and positioning, or operational alignment

Hence, the team goes into focused brainstorming with clarity and confidence about where to focus and what to do to create unique value, to satisfy the top unmet needs in the market.

With JTBD, companies are no longer generating questionable ideas; they’re creating winning ideas as part of an innovation and new product strategy with a roadmap for success.

Knowing where to focus your creativity makes a huge difference.

This is how companies consistently create winning new ideas. You can do it, too.