Is innovation inherently a hit-or-miss endeavor? Not if you understand why customers make the choices they do. For as long as we can remember, innovation has been a top priorityβand a top frustrationβfor leaders. Most people would agree that the vast majority of innovations fall far short of ambitions. Customer strategy. From the Magazine September Blue Landscape charcoal, ink, marker, and pencil on paper Marijah Bac Cam.
Firms have never known more about their customers, but their innovation processes remain hit-or-miss. 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.
If it does the job well, we hire it again. Jobs are multifaceted. 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. Read more on Customer strategy. A version of this article appeared in the September issue of Harvard Business Review.
