Book Review:Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

What is it about?

Clayton M. Christensen, widely accepted as the world’s most respected Innovation Guru and one of the Top 50 Thinkers in the world, together with Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon and David S. Duncan has come out with a very interesting book on innovation and how to get better at it. Most of the entrepreneurs and managers are obsessed about creating a better product which will appeal to the customers or continuously improve the existing products to differentiate from your competitors. And hope that you will be lucky and things will work out. But, Christensen et al asserts that this need not be the case if one truly understands what causes customers to buy the products/services. According to them, it is not about products but the ‘progress’ the customer will make with the use of products or services. Many companies fail to make the cut because they collect lot of data from the product side but not information on the progress side. Christensen and his co-authors introduces a new theory to provide a framework for the increased success of the products or services. According to this theory, when one buys a product, one essentially ‘hires’ it for getting a job done. If the product does the job well, one hires the same product again when one is confronted with the same job in future. If it fails to do a good job, one will ‘fire’ the product and search for something else which will perform the job and hire it. And a job, according to the authors, is the progress that a person is trying to make in a particular circumstance. This is key to understanding why the customers make the choices they make. The authors call the theory as Jobs Theory or Theory of Jobs to Be Done. The theory provides a powerful way of understanding the causal mechanism of customer behaviour which is the most fundamental driver of innovation success.

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Why is it important?

The new concept will enable the companies to understand why people buy products or services, to fine tune their products and marketing strategies.

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