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L9. The Customer-Centered Innovation Map - Coggle Diagram
L9. The Customer-Centered Innovation Map
Anatomy of a Customer Job
All jobs have a universal structure.
Jobs are separate from solutions.
Many companies are focused on the product or service they’re already developing, or on the one the competition is offering, rather than on the help they must give the customer to execute the steps in a job
While other MP3 manufacturers were concentrating on helping customers listen to music, for example, Apple reconsidered the entire job of music management, enabling customers to acquire, organize, listen to, and share music.
All jobs are processes.
Every job, from transplanting a heart to cleaning a floor, has a distinct beginning, middle, and end, and comprises a set of process steps along the way.
The starting point for identifying innovation opportunities is to map out—from the customer’s perspective—the steps involved in executing a particular job.
Once the steps are identified, a company can create value in a number of ways
removing an entire step from the responsibility of the customer
or enabling steps to be completed in new locations or at different times.
improving the execution of specific job steps
The Idea in Brief
To systematically uncover more—and better—innovative ideas, Bettencourt and Ulwick recommend job mapping:
Break down a job that customers want done into discrete steps.
Then brainstorm ways to make steps easier, faster, or unnecessary.
The Idea in Practice
Job mapping
With a job map in hand, a company can analyze the biggest drawbacks of the products and services customers currently use.
All jobs have the same eight steps. To use job mapping, look for opportunities to help customers at every step:
4: Confirm
Once preparation is complete, what does the customer need to verify before proceeding with the job to ensure its successful execution?
Validates the quality and functional capacity of material and informational components;
Confirms priorities when deciding among execution options.
This step is especially critical for jobs in which a delay in execution might risk a customer’s money, time, or safety.
A company seeking to differentiate itself at this step could help customers gain access to the types of information and feedback they need to confirm readiness and decide among execution alternatives.
5: Execute
What must customers do to execute the job successfully?
Because execution is also the most visible step, customers are especially concerned about avoiding problems and delays, as well as achieving optimal results.
Here, innovating companies can apply their technological know-how to provide customers with real-time feedback or to automatically correct execution problems.
3: Prepare
How must the customer prepare the inputs and environment to do the job?
Nearly all customer jobs involve an element of setting up and organizing materials.
To find ways to innovate, deconstruct the job a customer is trying to get done.
By working through the questions here, you can map a customer job in just a handful of interviews with customers and internal experts.
3 more items...
6: Monitor
What does the customer need to monitor to ensure that the job is successfully executed?
Customers must keep an eye on the results or output during execution, especially to determine whether they have to make adjustments to get the task back on track in the event of a problem.
For some jobs, customers must also monitor environmental factors to see whether and when adjustments are necessary.
2: Locate
What inputs or items must the customer locate to do the job?
Tangible
When tangible materials are involved, a company might consider streamlining this step by making the required components easier to gather, ensuring that they are available when and where needed, or eliminating the need for some inputs altogether.
Intangible
7: Modify
What might the customer need to alter for the job to be completed successfully?
When there are changes in inputs or in the environment,
or if the execution is problematic, the customer may need help with updates, adjustments, or maintenance.
At this step, customers need help deciding what should be adjusted as well as determining when, how, and where to
make changes.
Like monitoring, searching for the right adjustment can be both time consuming and costly.
1: Define
This step includes determining
objectives; planning the approach; assessing which resources are necessary or available to complete the job; and selecting resources.
In this step, a company can look for ways to help customers understand their objectives, simplify the resource-planning process, and reduce the amount of planning needed.
8: Conclude
What must the customer do to finish the job?
Customers often think of concluding steps as burdensome because the core job has already been completed, so companies need to help them simplify the process
Also, the conclusion of one job cycle is often the start of another or may affect the next one’s beginning.
One way to help customers finish the job is to design benefits sought at the conclusion into an earlier step in the process.
Ancillary step: Troubleshooting
What problems must the customer trouble shoot and resolve in the course of performing the job?
Even in the simplest jobs, things occasionally go wrong
What customers want at that point is a speedy resolution—which is a function of how clearly the problem is understood.
If a nurse gets cut when a surgeon hands him a scalpel, what
steps must the nurse take to avoid being infected with a blood-borne organism?
for example, how should the office worker remove the damaged paper?