Brand Innovation

In 1997, Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen published his first seminal work, The Innovator’s Dilemma, which laid out a concept he termed “Disruptive Innovation.” It took a few years for the book to catch on, but eventually its tightly-reasoned, well-evidenced and counter-intuitive approach found deep resonance with innovators worldwide.

We are all innovators now.

Covid-19 demanded new behaviors if companies were to survive. Speed, ongoing adaptation, and multi-dimensional innovation became necessities overnight. And it worked! Amid all its hardships, 2020 witnessed perhaps the fastest pace of innovation the world has ever seen – from new business models to new forms of customer interaction, and a great deal more.

What’s changed? Here are five key principles from the pandemic that you can embrace to sustain and keep building up your innovation strengths:

All over the world, people go about their days getting things done. Much of what they do is aimed at satisfying a collection of short and long-term objectives that they see as being related to their well-being. The many decisions that they make throughout the day—which toothpaste to use, whether to drink coffee or tea, what product to buy for their company—are all part of satisfying these objectives, as each person defines them.

Can you be both logical and creative when looking at how to solve a problem? I think yes. In fact, I say it is critical to the role of a strategist in a marketing agency.

Jobs to be Done is a hot concept. Companies as wide ranging as twitter, Nestlé, Clorox, and Cisco have been using the theory to double down on customer-centricity. Given that I co-authored one of leading books on the topic, this development is good news. However, I’m dismayed to see how people struggle with using the framework for market segmentation. They tend to over-simplistically bifurcate markets, define segments around jobs that are actually universally important, or frame the analysis from the wrong starting places (e.g., what people are buying today). There is a much better way.