How to Make Innovation and Growth a Repeatable Business Process

One of the big ideas that makes the jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) innovation approach so effective is the insight that innovation is the successful execution of two separate steps that, when done well and in the right sequence, consistently enable organization to establish product/market fit and drive revenue growth. The two steps are:

1. First, understand your target customers’ unmet needs
2. Then devise solution ideas to address them

Most organizations confuse creativity with innovation. Applying your creativity to well-defined customer needs leads to much higher success rates and more breakthrough innovations than attempting to come up with ideas first and then testing them with customers.

The risk of innovation can be dramatically reduced by gaining a solid understanding of what customers want to accomplish separate and distinct from any product or service solution before attempting to generate ideas.

The key to turning innovation and growth into a repeatable business process is to shift your focus away from generating ideas to helping customers get their jobs done. Then creativity is surprisingly easy. Here is our repeatable JTBD innovation process for driving growth in virtually any market.

Discover Your Target Customers’ Unmet Needs

1. Redefine your market as “a group of people who share a common desire to get a core job or jobs done.”
2. Interview customers to discover the jobs they want to get done (functionally, emotionally, and socially) and the criteria they use to measure success.
3. Determine which customer needs are both important to get done and yet poorly satisfied given their product/service solution. These are their unmet needs and your opportunities for value creation.

Develop Solutions

1. Select which opportunities to pursue for new value creation based on which you believe you can address and win. When you have rich insights about your target market like this, you can determine the best way to address the opportunity which may include building new or improved offerings, buying another company or capabilities, operational improvements, or simply changing your messaging and positioning.
2. Then, devise solution ideas to address the selected opportunities. At this point, having already validated the market opportunities and selected those you wish to pursue, you can go into a focused idea generation working session with confidence and clarity about where to focus and what to to create unique value. Knowing where to focus your creativity makes all the difference in the world.
3. Lastly, test, develop, and launch. Learning is accelerated when your experiments test ONLY your solution’s efficacy. Because you already validated the market upfront, you won’t confound experiments with questions about the customers’ needs.

While it’s true that customers cannot tell us what product or service solutions they want, they can tell us what they want to accomplish, feel, and experience in a language format that is ideal for guiding the development of new and improved offerings.

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around.” – Steve Jobs

Reveal needs. Create value. Drive growth.

MORE INNOVATION REVELATIONS:

• Video/Podcast Interview with Host Susan Tatum on “How to Launch New Offerings that People Want to Buy.”
• This False Belief is Killing Innovation
• How JTBD Reveals Latent Unarticulated Needs

Schedule a free discovery call with me here. And in the meantime, you can download this free PDF on How the Jobs-to-be-Done Approach Delivers Dramatically Better Results.