![]() Or what if your mother moves to an apartment just round the corner from where you live?.But suppose someone perfects the art of jetpacks next week so you can halve the journey time?.You’ll embrace the flyover and use it every time you make the journey. That’s great if you are currently wasting time sitting at traffic lights every time you make the journey. Earlier, we used the example of a flyover reducing journey time at a busy intersection so that you can get to your mother’s house 10 minutes faster. When products and services are seen from the JTBD perspective, we have clearer visibility of how effective or otherwise they are in meeting a customer’s needs. ![]() Schumpeter also observed that people tend to use only one solution for a job to be done, so when an established way of doing things is rendered obsolete, its fall can be rapid. We’ve seen it time and again during and since Schumpeter’s time, from transatlantic flights superseding ocean liners to movie streaming killing off the video hire business. Game-changing innovations act as a wrecking ball to the status quo. Key among his many insights in the mid 20th century was his theory of creative destruction. Arguably the most fundamental are the insights of economist and all-round business genius Joseph Schumpeter. But it draws together business theories that date back much further. The term Jobs-to-be-done was first coined in the early 21st century by Clayton Christensen. Stuffing a chocolate bar with nuts and nougat or putting a flyover across a roundabout or inventing a mobile app to access music files from the cloud are mere mechanisms that might or might not prove instrumental in getting the underlying job done. It could be as simple as satisfying his hunger, or allowing him to reach his mother’s house 10 minutes faster or equipping him with instant access to his favourite music. By this, he means that successfully getting the job done leaves the consumer in an improved state in some way or another. Instead, they want easy access to their books, or a place to display their family photographs.Īlan Klement defines a “job” in our current sense of the word as a “better me”. Nobody ever woke up wishing they had a 10mm hole in their wall, or even the shelf that the hole’s creation would serve to support. A job to be done should not be confused with a task or a process. So what do we mean when we describe a job to be done? It can best be described as a process that will change the current state of things for the better. ![]() It’s one thing to think we understand our customer’s needs, but oftentimes that understanding is superficial, over-simplistic or just plain wrong. When developing a novel product or service, product-market fit has to be front and centre in the entrepreneur’s mind. ![]() There are lessons to be learned from our opening example that run deeper than the obvious. In so doing, we are focusing on the need to be fulfilled - the job to be done - as opposed to getting carried away with the solution for its own sake. JTBD lays down a framework by which we can understand the value proposition of the product or service we are bringing to market. However, the danger is that by thinking too far outside the box, we find ourselves the proud custodians of solutions that are looking for problems to solve. In today’s commercial landscape, we hear plenty of talk about “blue sky thinking,” and three is certainly a need for “high risk, high return” research - as demonstrated by the government ploughing £800 million into a Blue Skies research agency. JTBD methodology eliminates the risk of businesses and startups falling into the same trap as our scientific researchers synthesizing a chemical that, to all intents and purposes, nobody needs. When they approached the pharma company, they were greeted with open arms and told they could expect an order of two pounds of the chemical every year. Seeing a business opportunity, a research firm came up with a way to synthesize the chemical for just $50 per pound. There is an apocryphal story about a pharma company that was paying $5,000 per pound for a particular chemical.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |