Customer-centered innovation: improving the odds for success

Purpose This masterclass examines how customer-centric marketing, using new perspectives developed by Clayton Christensen and others, can guide new product and service innovation. Christensen’s Jobs Theory revolves around the observation that “customers don’t buy products or services,” but rather “pull them into their lives to make progress” in some way that is particularly valuable to them.” Design/methodology/approach Two recent books are discussed in detail– Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice (2016), by Christensen and co-authors Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon and David Duncan and Sense & Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously (2017) by design and innovation experts, Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden Findings In coming to view innovation through the lens of Jobs Theory, what you see is not so much the customer at the center of the innovation universe, but “the customer’s Job to Be Done,”which “may seem like a small distinction, but, in reality, “it changes everything.” Practical Implications Identifying a well-defined Job to Be Done offers a kind of innovation blueprint which is different’ from the traditional marketing concept of “needs” because of the ‘much higher degree of specificity required to identify precisely what it is you are trying to solve for in particular use-case contexts. Originality/value When applied astutely, the concept of “Job to Be Done”can improve a company’s track record at new product or service introduction. For the first time it gives managers and other corporate leaders a guidebook for making innovation initiatives more likely to be successful.