The Big Oversight That Leads to Innovation Failure

A question that many senior leaders have (and some ask) when we meet is, “What do you know about my business that I don’t?”

That’s a very reasonable question if you think about innovation as the creation of new or improved solutions – which it is!

Yet every successful innovation must address an unmet need.

If you ever hope to make product/service innovation a repeatable business process, you must start by understanding the customers’ unmet needs.

That’s why I like defining innovation as “the process of discovering customers’ unmet needs and then developing solution ideas to address them.”

Here’s the magical thing about the Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) innovation approach (the way we do it) that most people don’t understand:

When you know what type of information to obtain from customers and how to get it, you get a precise set of customer instructions about where to focus and what to do to create unique value – boom!

No more guesswork!

I never know my client’s business better than they do. Sometimes I don’t have experience in their industry either and it’s irrelevant. They don’t need another industry expert; they have plenty of them!

What they need is a JTBD expert who can find the big opportunities in the market so that the team can then apply their industry expertise to the issues that they now know customers care about most.

We enter into a collaboration based on our unique roles that brings clarity and confidence to innovation.

This enables companies to create product/market fit upfront, before development because we have already:

1. 1. Identified and validated the big opportunities in the market
   2. Evaluated and selected those opportunities that are attractive to pursue for new value creation
   3. Determined the best way to address each selected opportunity, i.e., messaging and positioning, focused brainstorming, M&A, or operations alignment

This makes it possible to devise new and improved offering that you know have a good chance of winning in the market because they address the top unmet needs.