When I worked at market researcher, IDC, I met Tony Ulwick, CEO of Strategyn, who is a pioneer in the field of outcomes-based innovation.  The folks who introduced me to Tony were from Innosight, which is a company founded by Clayton Christensen.  IDC’s notion at the time was that by partnering with Innosight and Strategyn, we could provide a service to technology companies to help them with product innovation.  This assistance would help those technology companies innovate to better serve the jobs (or achieve the outcomes) that their customers or prospects were trying to do.

One of the basic premises of the methodology is that customers can “hire” a variety of things to get the job done.  Here’s a simple example.  You’re stuck in an airport for several hours, as I was today, and you are looking for something to do.  What are the things that you could “hire” to pass the time or prevent boredom? 

Examples might be:

  • A magazine
  • An MP3 player
  • A bar
  • A restaurant
  • A cell phone
  • A web terminal
  • A masseuse

If you are in Las Vegas, you might add a slot machine to the list.

Then to better increase the probability that your particular solution gets “hired” for the pass-the-time job, you innovate around attributes that help your solution better serve that particular job.  In the case of a cell phone, it might be a longer battery life.  Two hours might be plenty of talk-time battery life for the typical business day, but not one in which you are stuck in the airport for several hours.  In the case of the bar, it might be the addition of a sports broadcast for the sports-minded travelers who feel uncomfortable sitting at a table alone.  For a restaurant, children’s meals and a cartoon broadcast, or crayons and coloring books, might fight the boredom for families traveling with children.

These are relatively simplistic examples, but in working with a variety of companies over the past 20 years, as a user, buyer, market researcher, and now facilitator of “business acceleration” services, I have been struck by the fact that many so-called solutions, serve a very wide variety of jobs, but serve each individual job relatively poorly.  Too many solutions end up being a poor approximation of “everything to everybody,” as opposed to being razor-sharp focused on serving specific jobs.

On my return flight to Boston, I sat with the CFO of a major chain of family fitness centers. We brainstormed for a few minutes around the jobs for which someone could hire his fitness centers. Here’s one example: Maintaining maximum mobility for seniors (say people 75 years of age and older).

His fitness centers, I’m sure, have plenty of equipment that would help seniors stay fit. But what attributes could be enhanced to better serve the “maintain maximum mobility” job? Seniors are prone to physical injury, so one important attribute is “injury prevention,” and perhaps adding on-site physical therapists with specialization in geriatrics or low-impact water aerobics classes would better serve the job. Many seniors don’t drive, so if the attribute is “accessibility,” perhaps a shuttle service between an assisted living center and the fitness center would better serve the job.

I’m not saying that heads of startups should think narrowly in terms of the jobs they want to serve.  In fact, to maintain a more-predictable revenue stream, it helps to diversify. But what I am saying is that as you innovate, should focus narrowly and deeply on specific jobs that you might serve better. This will provide better differentiation in a crowded market and better insure that when someone goes out to “hire” something to do a job, they will pick yours.