By: Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, and David S. Duncan
How do companies know how to grow? How can they create products that they are sure customers want to buy? Can innovation be more than a game of hit and miss? Competing Against Luck offers powerful new insights that will help innovators create predictably successful innovations.
After years of research, it has become clear that our long held maxim–that understanding the customer is the crux of innovation–is wrong. Customers don’t buy products or services; they “hire” them to do a job. Understanding customers does not drive innovation success, then. Understanding customer jobs does. 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 just a few. But this book is not about celebrating these successes–it’s about predicting new ones.
By understanding what causes customers to “hire” a product or service, any business can improve its innovation track record, creating products that customers not only want to hire, but that they’ll pay premium prices to bring into their lives. Jobs Theory offers new hope for growth to companies frustrated by their hit and miss efforts.
