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Innovation Method Could Change the World

1 pointsby tedthayerabout 4 years ago
Let me share a quick story with you:<p>In 2017 I was a lowly assistant that regularly refused my friend&#x27;s calls to start a company with them. That is until I met and was encouraged by a successful founder who was my boss at a side gig making flying machines ...<p>I fell in love with innovation. Over the past several years I grew one startup to 10 people and $thousands in sales before going bankrupt and homeless - learning the lesson to not be ideas-first. I tried again with a laboratory spin-off and followed Steve Blank&#x27;s Lean Startup process to find a market need, getting a million in sales and an interview invite to YC, but we struggled to turn the qualitative insights from 100+ interviews into tangible deliverables or accelerating growth.<p>Then I discovered Tony Ulwick&#x27;s &quot;Outcome-Driven Innovation&quot; (also known as &quot;Jobs to be Done&quot;) process and something clicked: This methodology could, with high degree (86%) of certainty, determine exactly what &quot;outcomes&quot; the market wanted and thus which ideas can win. The root cause of low success rate in needs-first approaches was the lack of a common definition for what a &quot;Customer Need&quot; even is!<p>So for the last year I&#x27;ve been sharing Tony&#x27;s methodology with others. But oftentimes, they&#x27;re not interested. Even within my startup community it seems like everyone is far more keen to follow the more accepted but inferior &quot;Fail Fast&quot; and &quot;Lean Startup&quot; approaches, despite the far lower success rate.<p>Why is this? What can I do to help this method go viral and share what I&#x27;ve learned with the world?

1 comment

gus_massaabout 4 years ago
The method may be good, but the 86% is very suspicious. For this kind of thing I&#x27;d be happy if they can show more than a half accuracy, or 3&#x2F;4, but 86% looks too precise to be a real number.