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Red pill and blue pill





Yann Wermuth explains why you should chose the blue pill over the red pill:

Companies don't know it, but they are trapped. Trapped in one way of thinking that in fact endangers all of their innovation ideas. It's one of the main reasons why innovation fails.


There is a way out, but you have to make the choice. You can either take the red pill. If you take the red pill, innovation goes on as it always does. Everything will stay the same. The red pill is called "technology driven innovation". It's how companies usually do innovation. They come up with a solution, they develop it and then bring it to the market and hope that customers will like it. That approach however delivers very low results.

Or you take the blue pill. The blue pill will completely change the way you look at innovation. Everything will change and I am warning you you will not be able to go back to the way you did innovation before. The blue pill is called Jobs-to-be-done thinking. It has much higher chances of success because it focuses on the true needs of your customers. Let me show you a little bit more in detail what jobs-to-be-done thinking is. A corner stone of jobs-to-be-done thinking is that in innovation you should first focus on the customer needs and goals and not on the solutions. Solutions come in later. As Tedd Levitt said: people don't want a drill, they want a whole in the wall. So what you should focus on is not only the drill but what the drill is used for. Maybe, and this is Levitts message, innovation isn't even about the drill. Jobs-to-be-done switches the perspective from the inside-out solution thinking to the outside perspective of your customer. To give you some other examples from our cases:

  • Commuters don't want to take the train. They just want to get from A to B.

  • Teachers don't want a new software. But, they want to capture their student's attention.

  • People don't want chocolate. They want to reward themselves after a busy day.


Jobs-to-be-done delivers much higher changes of success because innovation now focuses on the true goal of your customers and not just a particular solution. We have applied jobs-to-be-done over 100 times. Using our proven CFI methodology in many different industries. So, if you want the blue pill and change the way you think about innovation get in touch!






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