LOOKING OUTSIDE-IN For “The Jobs to Be Done Playbook” author Jim Kalbach, corporations need to create a culture focused on human-centered innovation.
Jim Kalbach, Author, “The Jobs to Be Done Playbook”
There are opportunities for innovation that you can find in the marketplace if you look beyond yourself—if you take an outside-in view rather than an inside-out view. Rather than coming up with the technology and worrying about how you develop that and get it to the market, it flips the script: start with the need and work back toward the solution.
Some organizations are getting that memo, but a perspective shift is needed to embrace a more human-centered view of innovation.
Human-centered innovation is about fundamentally understanding human needs, the primary focus of the field of jobs to be done (JTBD). The approach demands that you start with the outside-in perspective. What’s the objective that people are trying to get done independent
of technology or solutions (including yours)? Use that as inspiration and direct input into your innovation efforts. But human needs are fuzzy—perhaps the fuzziest part of the “fuzzy front end of innovation.” Humans are not rational creatures. They don’t all behave the same. To find patterns in human behavior that can feed into your innovation cycle is a tricky thing to do. What “Jobs to Be Done” does as an innovation framework is that it allows you to do that consistently, repeatedly, and precisely. Whatever problem we’re trying to solve, I can go out and definitively point to a human need that becomes the input to innovation. I can also do that in a way that brings other people along on the journey. But, to do that, there needs to be a common language. PREDICTING END-USER ADOPTION It doesn’t matter where innovation starts. I believe it should start with human needs, but you could come up with a technological solution and say, “I have this innovation.” My point is that innovation always ends with a human decision. Innovation ends with the
FEI 2024 & Key Innovation Perspectives
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