Firms have never known more about their customers, but their innovation
processes remain hit-or-miss. Why? According to Christensen and his
coauthors, product developers focus too much on building customer
profiles and looking for correlations in data. To create offerings that
people truly want to buy, firms instead need to home in on the job the
customer is trying to get done. Some jobs are little (pass the time);
some are big (find a more fulfilling career). When we buy a product, we
essentially “hire” it to help us do a job. If it does the job well,
we’ll hire it again. If it does a crummy job, we “fire” it and look for
something else to solve the problem. Jobs are multifaceted. They’re
never simply about function; they have powerful social and emotional
dimensions. And the circumstances in which customers try to do them are
more critical than any buyer characteristics. Consider the experiences
of condo developers targeting retirees who wanted to downsize their
homes. Sales were weak until the developers realized their business was
not construction but transitioning lives. Instead of adding more
features to the condos, they created services assisting buyers with the
move and with their decisions about what to keep and to discard. Sales
took off. The key to successful innovation is identifying jobs that are
poorly performed in customers’ lives and then designing products,
experiences, and processes around those jobs. INSETS: Identifying Jobs
to Be Done;Doing Jobs for B2B Customers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]