Anthony W. Ulwick > Quotes

“Product innovation, or service innovation, which is the most common type of innovation, results from improvements that are made to existing products and services.”
― Anthony Ulwick, What Customers Want (PB): Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services

“Disruptive innovation, as made popular by Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen, results when a company uses a new technology to disrupt the prevailing business model in an existing market that is filled with overserved customers. This approach to innovation is different.”
― Anthony Ulwick, What Customers Want (PB): Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services

“Nearly everyone in a major corporation has participated in a brainstorming session in which, without knowing the customer’s needs, they were encouraged to generate hundreds of ideas and were told that there is no such thing as a bad idea. You can probably still picture walls of Post-It notes.”
― Anthony W. Ulwick, Jobs to be Done: Theory to Practice

“Probably the most difficult challenge in getting customer inputs is determining in advance which of the three types of customer data (jobs, outcomes, or constraints) to try to capture in a given situation. Several common situations arise.”
― Anthony W. Ulwick, What Customers Want (PB): Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services

“Job statement = verb + object of the verb (noun) + contextual clarifier”
― Anthony W. Ulwick, Jobs to be Done: Theory to Practice

“An agreed-on language is fundamental to success in any discipline, yet confusion has permeated product development because companies continue to define "requirements" as any kind of customer input: customer wants, needs, benefits, solutions, ideas, desires, demands, specifications, and so on. But really, those are all different types of inputs, none of which can be used predictably to ensure success.”
― Anthony Ulwick, What Customers Want (PB): Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services

“the customer-driven movement has failed to produce the desired results because asking the customer what he wants solicits not only the wrong inputs, but inputs that inadvertently cause the failures that managers are fervently trying to avoid.”
― Anthony Ulwick, What Customers Want (PB): Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services

“A new market innovation occurs when a company discovers that people (individuals or businesses) are struggling to get a job done on their own because no products exist and devises a creative product or service that enables customers to get that job done faster and cheaper than ever before; ultimately, the company creates a new market.”
― Anthony Ulwick, What Customers Want (PB): Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services

“Only after knowing what jobs customers are trying to get done and what outcomes they are trying to achieve are companies able to systematically and predictably identify opportunities and create products and services that deliver significant new value. Only then can they figure out What Customers Want.”
― Anthony Ulwick, What Customers Want (PB): Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services

“companies need to figure out what jobs customers want to get done and how they measure success in getting a job done before they can determine what solutions customers want.”
― Anthony Ulwick, What Customers Want (PB): Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services

“Most companies are great at creating products—they just aren’t that great at creating the right products.”
― Anthony W. Ulwick, Jobs to be Done: Theory to Practice

“Operational innovation happens when a company discovers inefficiencies in a business operation and works to address those inefficiencies through creative solutions.”
― Anthony Ulwick, What Customers Want (PB): Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services

“Development and marketing managers are responsible for identifying opportunities for growth, segmenting markets, conducting competitive analysis, generating and evaluating ideas, generating intellectual property, communicating value to customers, and measuring customer satisfaction.”
― Anthony W. Ulwick, What Customers Want (PB): Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services

“For a company to innovate, it must create products and services that let consumers perform a job faster, better, more conveniently, and/or less expensively than before. To achieve this objective, companies must know what outcomes customers are trying to achieve (what metrics they use to determine how well a job is getting done) and figure out which technologies, products, and features will best satisfy the important outcomes that are currently underserved.”
― Anthony Ulwick, What Customers Want (PB): Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services

“To execute their innovation processes successfully, companies must obtain three distinct types of data. They must know which jobs their customers are trying to get done (that is, the tasks or activities customers are trying to carry out); the outcomes customers are trying to achieve (that is, the metrics customers use to define the successful execution of a job); and the constraints that may prevent customers from adopting or using a new product or service.”
― Anthony Ulwick, What Customers Want (PB): Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services

“Technically speaking, innovation is the process of creating a product or service solution that delivers significant new customer value.”
― Anthony Ulwick, What Customers Want (PB): Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services