Innovator's DNA

by Jeff Dyer

  Dietz’s experience with the GE Adventure Series scanners illustrates this idea. Dietz’s observation of a young crying girl in the scanner room led him to realize that the scanner he had designed wasn’t doing a very good job at providing an effective scan experience for the patient. He had focused solely on the functional job to be done for the physician. But young patients needed an experience that was less traumatic in order to reduce the anxiety—and, incidentally, the costs—associated with their MRI scan. Dietz’s success was the result of an observation that helped him see beyond the functional job to be done for the physician to see the emotional job to be done for the patient.

  Understanding the Job to Be Done

  Every job has a functional, a social, and an emotional dimension, and the relative importance of these elements varies from job to job. For example, “I need to feel like I belong to an elite, exclusive group” is a job for which consumers hire luxury-brand products such as Gucci and Versace. In this case, the functional dimension of the job isn’t nearly as important as its social and emotional dimensions. In contrast, the jobs for which they might hire a delivery truck are dominated by functional requirements. Understanding the functional, social, and emotional dimensions of a job to be done can be quite complex, but may be key to an innovative solution. (For more insights on the job-to-be-done concept in theory and practice, see Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice, by Clayton Christensen, Karen Dillon, Taddy Hall, and David Duncan.)

  For example, we hire schools to educate young people in our society and often criticize them for not doing the job well. The question we typically ask is, “Why aren’t schools performing as well as they should?” Perhaps a key reason we’re dissatisfied with the state of public K–12 education is that we’ve been asking the wrong question. If we asked instead, “Why aren’t students learning?” we might discover things that others do not yet perceive. A key reason why so many students languish unmotivated in school or don’t come to class at all is that education isn’t a job that they are trying to do. They mainly want to feel successful and to have fun with friends, meeting important social and emotional needs each day. No wonder some students drop out of school to hang out in gangs or cruise in cars with friends, since these activities often do the job better than school.

  By deeply understanding the particular social and emotional needs of high school students (the jobs these students want done every day), the MET (Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center) school, a charter school in Providence, Rhode Island, designed a project-based curriculum where students worked together each day on various projects (containing elements of the Montessori method, which provided “hands-on” interactive learning experiences). This approach gave students an opportunity to have fun with friends while feeling a sense of accomplishment because they could see how their efforts moved a project toward completion. They hardly realized they were developing new skills as they completed their tasks on the projects. By better meeting the students’ social and emotional needs, the school motivated students to participate and learn. This illustrates how important it is to look beyond the functional job to be done.

  But new ideas are often triggered by understanding a functional job to be done. Then, later, additional observations can trigger ideas for meeting social and emotional needs. Moreover, there must be a degree of readiness on the part of the observer to make use of the data from the observation. Consider the case of Frédéric Mazzella, founder of BlaBlaCar. It was December of 2004 and Mazzella had a problem. The Stanford computer-science major had returned to his native France for the holiday season to visit his family, who lived 420 kilometers from Paris, in the Vendée. But all of the trains between Paris and the Vendée were fully booked that time of year. Faced with the unappealing prospect of missing Christmas at home, Mazzella persuaded his sister to make a lengthy detour to pick him up. During the journey home, Mazzella made a life-changing observation. “Once on the road I realized that most cars were empty except for the driver, while the trains which could be seen from the highway going in the same direction were all full,” recalls Mazzella. “This experience gave me the idea for BlaBlaCar. I thought, OK, we’ll put those cars with empty seats in a search engine so that we can search the available seats in cars just like we search available seats on trains.” The observation was so transformative that Mazzella claims he “couldn’t sleep for the next three days” as he was formulating the vision and plans for a ride-sharing service that would allow passengers to find drivers with empty seats via the internet and mobile phones.

  Mazzella’s observation predated Uber by five years, and BlaBlaCar was the first successful ride-sharing app. Mazzella says his experience at Stanford had primed him to look for startup opportunities. And as a computer-science major, he had learned to look for opportunities to organize data in the physical world, data that was not well organized or accessible. “I tend to observe a lot before making a decision,” Mazzella told us. “I think observing those empty cars helped me put together the pieces of the puzzle. I realized that there was no database that was reproducing the availability of car seats on the road. And with everyone connected by mobile phones, I saw the opportunity to create online booking of seats in cars. Intuition comes after a long and broad observation of lots of factors.”

  The name BlaBlaCar might seem random, but it actually relates to an observation the company’s founders made about a need people have when they hire the service. When users select a driver and a car, they can choose how chatty they want the ride to be. There are three options: “bla” means a quiet driver, “blabla” means a driver who is slightly chatty, and “blablabla” refers to drivers who can be really chatty. This distinction means that the service can meet not only the functional need of transporting someone from point A to point B but also social needs for interaction. Mazzella and his team are so keen on the importance of learning through observation that they have an internal initiative labeled BlaBlaSwap, which gives staff the opportunity to spend a week working in one of the offices in a different geographic location (BlaBlaCar operates in twenty-two countries and is one of the largest tech unicorns in France, with an estimated market value north of $1.5 billion).

  Like Mazzella, we have found that observing is a key discovery skill for most innovators, who tend to generate business insights from one of three types of observations:

  Finding themselves with a need to get a job done, looking for solution options, and discovering a lack of options for effectively getting that job done.

  Watching people in different circumstances who are trying to do a job and gaining insight about what job they really want to get done.

  Observing people, processes, companies, or technologies and seeing a solution that can be applied (perhaps with some modification) in a different context.

  Mike Collins, founder and CEO of the Big Idea Group (BIG), claims that successful product innovators always have their observation skills turned on. “Observation isn’t just a one-‘aha’ day. Innovators are observing the world around them and asking questions all the time. It’s part of who they are. For other people, it is an untapped skill.” Collins knows what he is talking about. As founder of BIG, a company that has used the American Idol (or Britain’s Got Talent) business model to screen the best ideas of inventors and then take them to market, Collins has worked with over a thousand inventors who are part of the BIG network. We found that product innovators boast the best observing skills among innovators, followed by startup and corporate entrepreneurs, and finally process innovators. Innovators, on average, score at around the seventy-fifth percentile for observing, while noninnovators score at around the forty-eighth percentile. (See figure 4-1.)

  FIGURE 4-1

  Comparison of observing skills for different types of innovators and noninnovators

  Sample items:

  Gets new business ideas by directly observing how people interact with products and services.

  Regularly observe
s the activities of customers, suppliers, or other companies to get new ideas.

  How does someone develop the observing skill if it is currently untapped? To discover what innovators do, we asked them, “What makes someone a good observer? How can someone get better at observing?” We have found that observers are more successful at figuring out jobs to be done and better ways to do them when they: (1) actively watch customers to see what products they hire to do what jobs, (2) learn to look for surprises or anomalies, and (3) find opportunities to observe in a new environment.

  Actively Watch Customers—and Look for Workarounds

  Perhaps the most obvious way to get business insights through observing is to actively watch people as they hire products to do jobs, and then see what insights you can gain about the job to be done. For example, Gary Crocker, founder of the medical-device firm Research Medical Inc. (acquired by Baxter International), got the idea for some “plumbing” devices that could help surgeons perform heart-bypass surgery after observing them do what was very new surgery at the time. He noticed the cardiovascular monitoring catheters that were threaded into the heart to measure blood pressure, but he also noticed that there weren’t any good “plumber tools” to manage the flow of blood. “There weren’t really big catheters that would take all the blood out of the body and take it into the oxygenator when your lungs and heart are shut down during surgery,” Crocker said. “There wasn’t a well-structured plumbing line. So I thought I could create a product like that. That’s a nice little niche.”

  So Crocker eventually left Baxter to start a company that created a variety of specialized devices to control the flow of blood during cardiac surgery. One device, Visuflo with Light Source, addressed the challenges of operating on bleeding sites in beating-heart surgery by blowing a stream of filtered, humidified air onto the suture site to remove unwanted blood flow that compromised the surgeon’s visibility. The device also enhanced visibility by providing an ancillary light source that could be directed into the surgical opening. Without these devices, surgeons would come up with their own ways to get more light into a surgical opening (for example, have a nurse shine a separate light into the opening) or their own techniques to remove unwanted blood flow (for example, trying different suction devices to remove blood). The insights for Crocker’s innovative devices came only after carefully observing the challenges that surgeons faced as they performed cardiac surgery and the workarounds they developed to solve those problems.

  The term workaround originated in the IT world where programmers had to “work around” a particular problem in the system. The concept applies equally well to other domains. A workaround is an incomplete or partial solution to a particular job to be done. When you notice a workaround, pay attention, as it might provide clues for how to create an entirely new product, service, or business to do the job.

  For example, OpenTable is a more comprehensive solution to the workarounds that we typically use when trying to have a great dining experience (the job to be done). The key elements include finding a restaurant that offers the desired quality of food and atmosphere, reserving a table at a convenient time without a wait, and getting a reasonable price for the meal. Finding the right restaurant often involves asking for referrals or reading restaurant reviews. After finding the right restaurant, you then call to make a reservation. If the restaurant doesn’t take reservations or has no reservation available, then you start the process again. You might even simply go to the restaurant early—or possibly send someone to wait in line for you—in order to ensure you get a table or to minimize waiting time. If you are price sensitive, you might look for coupons online or in the newspaper to get a better price for your dining experience. All these activities take time and still don’t ensure a great dining experience.

  Chuck Templeton, founder of OpenTable, witnessed these workarounds firsthand in 1998 when his wife spent three and a half hours trying—without any luck—to get reservations at a desirable restaurant when his in-laws visited them in Chicago. So Templeton launched an online app that is essentially your own restaurant concierge service: it allows customers to quickly and easily find a restaurant they might like (by providing insightful reviews and customer ratings), get a reservation at a convenient time (by allowing customers to see table availability and book their own reservation), and even have access to discounted meals (by giving points for meal discounts). Restaurants pay OpenTable a fee for every diner who lands at their restaurant through the system.7 By doing a better job of helping customers have a great dining experience, OpenTable now dominates the dining-reservation process in most large US cities and in many others abroad (with over eleven thousand restaurants in its system worldwide).

  While watching people trying to do a job to gain insights for new product or service offerings seems straightforward, most company managers spend little time in this simple, commonsense approach. But when companies uncover the hidden needs of the customer through observation (whether it be serendipitous observation, live-in immersion, or video observation), they gain insights that can prove extremely valuable. IDEO’s Kelley reports that when designing a new kids’ toothbrush for Oral-B, IDEO went out in the field to watch kids brush their teeth. What the team noticed was that kids’ toothbrushes were just smaller versions of adult toothbrushes, which proved to be a challenge for kids to hold and maneuver because they lacked the dexterity of their parents. This led to an innovative design: big, fat, squishy toothbrushes that were much easier for kids to hold and use. The result? Oral-B had the bestselling kids’ toothbrushes in the world for the next eighteen months.

  Ten Questions to Ask While Observing Customers

  Here are ten questions you should ask while observing customers to better understand the job they want done and how you can offer a product or service that will help them do it better.

  How do customers become aware of a need for your product or service? Is there a way to make it easier or more convenient for them to find your offering?

  What do customers really use your product or service for? What job is the customer hiring your product or service to do?

  What does the customer ultimately consider as the most important features when selecting a final product or service? (If the customer has a hundred points to allocate across all the features she considers important, how would she allocate them?)

  How do consumers order and purchase your product? Is there a way you can make it easier, more convenient, or less costly?

  How do you deliver your product or service? Can you do it faster, cheaper, in a completely different way?

  How do customers pay for your product or service? Is there a way to make it easier or more convenient?

  What frustrations do your customers have when trying to use your product? Do they use your product in ways you didn’t expect?

  What do consumers need help with when they use the product?

  Do customers do things that hurt the longevity or reliability of your product or service?

  How do customers repair, service, or dispose of your product? Are there opportunities to make this easier or more convenient (or to teach the customer how to do self-maintenance or to use the product so it requires less maintenance)?

  Look for Surprises or Anomalies

  At Intuit, Cook asks his marketing and software engineers to observe customers in their homes as they load and attempt to use Quicken and QuickBooks software. As they watch customers use the product, he asks them “to savor the surprises”—the things that seem unusual or the times when people don’t behave as they are supposed to. For example, Cook tells them: “When you see something unexpected, you need to ask, ‘Why did you do that? Well, that doesn’t make sense. I never expected that.’” Customers often have to find workarounds—meaning they may use the product in unintended ways—and these surprising workarounds often provide clues as to why the current product or service is an incomplete solution. Cook claims that you have to consciously be looking for surprises—the unexpected�
�because they are typically lost as our minds conform what we see to fit our preexisting beliefs. To battle that tendency, Cook says that “at Intuit we teach our people to ask these two questions as they observe: What is surprising? What is different from what you expected? That’s where true learning and innovation starts.”

  Noticing the unnoticed calls for a peripheral vision, where innovators habitually surface new ideas by noticing things at the edge of experience (or as an IDEO employee explained, “look for people on the extremes”). For example, Corey Wride founded Movie Mouth Inc.—a company providing software that helps you learn to speak a new language by watching movies—after making what seemed to him a surprising observation during an extended trip to Brazil. Wride was conducting training sessions to prepare Brazilians for US graduate-school entrance exams like the GMAT. During these trips, he encountered a large number of Brazilians who were eager to practice their English on him to prepare for the TOEFL test. When he found people who were particularly good English speakers, he would often ask them how they learned the language. (He expected those with the best English skills to be individuals who regularly attended one of the many English-learning schools in Brazil. In fact, many of the better speakers did attend these schools, but he later learned that they were not the best speakers of English.)

  The Value of Anomalies in Scientific as Well as Commercial Innovation

  Many years ago, Thomas Kuhn, in his landmark book on the history of science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, essentially argued that scientific breakthroughs happen—and new and improved theories emerge—when a researcher observes the world well enough to identify and explain an anomaly.a The discovery of an anomaly—a surprise—gives scientists the opportunity to revisit a particular theory in an attempt to better understand it. This often leads to a modification or improvement of the theory by understanding and explaining the anomaly. For example, in research on the impacts of technological innovation on the fortunes of firms, early studies concluded that established firms, on average, do well when faced with incremental innovation, but stumble when confronted with radical change. But there were anomalies to this general conclusion. Some established firms successfully implemented radical technological change.