THIS IS a unique way of being creative. Creativity according to Steve Jobs is connecting the dots. He meant that if you have a series of ideas, oftentimes coming up with a new idea or product is just to connect those previous ideas. But in this book, “Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice” by Clayton Christensen looks at creativity in a psychological and social way especially in business, whether coming up with a new product or tweaking with your current product.
If you were the owner of a fast-food restaurant that sold milkshakes, and your milkshakes weren’t selling well, how would you go about improving your milkshakes? (a) Would you buy higher quality ingredients? (b) Would you survey customers to see what flavors they would like to see on the menu? (c) Would you focus on one popular flavor, say chocolate, and make the chocolate shake richer? The author says many companies waste so much money on innovation that is too often based on luck much like the innovation choices mentioned. It’s like throwing out a bunch of seeds and hoping for one of them to take root and grow into something people will buy.
Clayton Christensen, a Harvard professor who has been studying innovation for two decades says, “Instead of asking, ‘How can I get more people to buy my product?’, they need to ask, ‘What job are my customers hiring this product to do?’” The author is saying to think of your product like a person applying for a job. Why would you hire that person? It would be asking many things aside from just satisfying a hunger if your product is food, on what other experiences would your customers want from your product? When we hire someone for a job we expect many things from that person and not just to show up to work every day, such as is this person a team player? Or is this person easy to deal with? The author recommends the following ideas, in this new way of innovating.
Find a Job That Needs to be Done.
Aim to understand why you, having a set of existing customers, or a set of target customers would want to have your product into their lives. In the book, a survey was made to find out “Why would you hire this milkshake?” One customer replied because it is thick and takes time to consume. It gives him something to sip while driving. He prefers it rather than eating chocolates which are too quick to consume or having a bagel which he finds too messy. The reply of the customer was like a job list, so an innovation to come up with for a milkshake might be to make it thicker so it can be even more time consuming to take or add fruits to vary its flavor.
When looking for a job to be done, think of yourself less as an entrepreneur and more of a psychologist. You want to find out what people care about.
Document the Journey
Find out the experience it takes to buy a milkshake from the moment a customer sees a billboard sign about milkshakes, to the time a customer waits for the milkshake to be prepared, to what they do with it after buying, and up until they arrive in their office or school. You want to be like a documentary filmmaker. Your goal is to find out where, when, and what they are doing at the moment they have the desire to hire your product, and then create a timeline of the experience that follows. Based on these stages of buying and consuming, find out what you can improve or innovate.
Remove the Obstacles
You would want to document the journey of the customer because you want to remove the obstacles or frustrations the customer would have in purchasing your product or to create a better experience with your product. The new experience you create must at least be twice as good as their current experience. Why? Because most of us get anxious when hiring something new. New is often scary. Behavioral economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky have done several studies to show that “Loss aversion—people’s tendency to want to avoid loss (and maintain the status quo)—is twice as powerful psychologically as the allure of gains.” Executing these three steps won’t be easy, but it’s far easier than the alternative: spending a bunch of time and money on a series of innovations and hoping one of them leads to more sales. (ECC)
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