Conceptually, it’s quite simple.

1. First, discover what your target customers unmet needs (Ready, take aim,…)
2. Then develop solution ideas to address them (Fire!)

If you want to turn innovation into a repeatable business process, you must execute the two key steps of innovation in the right sequence.

That is, first, discover:

1. The jobs your target customers are trying to get done, e.g., the main functional job, other related jobs, emotional jobs, etc.
2. The criteria they use to measure success when executing each step in the main functional job
3. Which of the jobs/criteria remain unmet, i.e., are important yet poorly satisfied (these are opportunities for innovation and growth)
4. The hidden high-opportunity market segments based on segmenting the market according to customers’ shared unmet jobs and/or criteria, not demographics. “Jobs-based” segmentation can drive breakthrough growth because it reveals hidden opportunities that your competitors may not even be aware of.

Then develop solution ideas to address the best opportunities:

1. To prepare for “focused brainstorming” to devise solution ideas, we first will facilitate a strategy working session with the client team to evaluate the opportunities and select those that are attractive to pursue for new value creation given your firm’s relative advantage. Every great new product and growth strategy is formulated by addressing big unmet market needs with the firm’s relative advantage. This process engineers that.
2. Then determine the best way to address the selected opportunities:

• • Develop new or improved offerings
  • Create better messaging and positioning
  • Identify M&A candidates
  • Align operations with customers’ needs

Do you see how defining markets as “jobs to be done” in language that is free of any references to product or service solutions gives executive teams unique strategic perspective to choose “where to play” and “how to win?”

3. And last, conduct a facilitated focused brainstorming sessions with a cross-functional team to devise solution ideas that address the selected opportunities. Focused brainstorming is very different from traditional brainstorming because, in focused brainstorming, you will already have identified and validated the biggest opportunities in the market, and the client team will have evaluated and selected those opportunities that are most attractive to pursue. This gives the team clarity and confidence about where to focus and what to do to create unique value.

Not surprisingly, knowing where to focus your creativity makes all the difference in the world. Like other systems, your innovation process is only as good as its inputs. Garbage in, garbage out reigns here, too.

But when you know how to master the front end so that you only enter ideas into your pipeline that address big unmet needs and that are attractive to the firm, all the activities downstream become execution.

With the diagnosis confirmed and the treatment plan identified, now you can treat the customer with confidence that they will get well.

And this process complements and precedes other innovation approaches such as Design Thinking, Lean, and Agile.

Are you tired of guessing what customers want?

Want to eliminate the guesswork and simply get clear, actionable, potentially game-changing customer insights?

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