Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice
The leading expert on innovation and growth presents a groundbreaking innovation book that every company needs to transform innovation from a game of chance to one in which they develop products and services that customers not only want to buy, but are willing to pay premium prices for.
How do companies know how to grow? How can they develop products that they are sure customers will want to buy? Can innovation be more than a game of hit and miss? Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen has the answer. A generation ago, Christensen revolutionized business with his groundbreaking theory of disruptive innovation. Now he takes it a step further and offers powerful new insights.
After years of research, Christensen and his co-authors have reached a crucial conclusion: Our long-held maxim- that understanding the customer is at the core of innovation- is wrong. Customers don't buy products or services; they "rent" them to complete a task. He argues that understanding customers is not the key to innovation success. Understanding customer tasks is. The "Jobs to Be Done" approach can be seen in some of the world's most respected companies and fast-growing startups, including Amazon, Intuit, Uber, Airbnb, and Chobani yogurt, to name a few. But this book isn't about celebrating those successes- it's about predicting new ones.
Christensen, Hall, Dillon, and Duncan contend that any company can improve its innovation record by understanding what drives customers to "rent" a product or service by creating products that customers not only want to rent, but also pay premium prices to bring into their lives. Jobs theory offers new hope for growth to companies frustrated by their unsuccessful efforts.
This book carefully lays out the authors' provocative framework and offers a comprehensive explanation of the theory and why it is predictive, how to apply it in the real world-and, most importantly, how not to waste the insights it provides.
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