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    Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice
    Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice
    Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice
    Ebook330 pages5 hours

    Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

    By Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon and David S. Duncan

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    The foremost authority on innovation and growth presents a path-breaking book every company needs to transform innovation from a game of chance to one in which they develop products and services customers not only want to buy, but are willing to pay premium prices for.

    How do companies know how to grow? How can they create products that they are sure customers want to buy? Can innovation be more than a game of hit and miss? Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen has the answer. A generation ago, Christensen revolutionized business with his groundbreaking theory of disruptive innovation. Now, he goes further, offering powerful new insights.

    After years of research, Christensen has come to one critical conclusion: our long held maxim—that understanding the customer is the crux of innovation—is wrong. Customers don’t buy products or services; they "hire" them to do a job. Understanding customers does not drive innovation success, he argues. Understanding customer jobs does. The "Jobs to Be Done" approach can be seen in some of the world’s most respected companies and fast-growing startups, including Amazon, Intuit, Uber, Airbnb, and Chobani yogurt, to name just a few. But this book is not about celebrating these successes—it’s about predicting new ones.

    Christensen contends that by understanding what causes customers to "hire" a product or service, any business can improve its innovation track record, creating products that customers not only want to hire, but that they’ll pay premium prices to bring into their lives. Jobs theory offers new hope for growth to companies frustrated by their hit and miss efforts.

    This book carefully lays down Christensen’s provocative framework, providing a comprehensive explanation of the theory and why it is predictive, how to use it in the real world—and, most importantly, how not to squander the insights it provides.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 4, 2016
    ISBN9780062435637
    Author

    Clayton M. Christensen

    CLAYTON M. CHRISTENSEN (1952–2020) was the Kim B. Clark Professor at Harvard Business School, the author of nine books, a five-time recipient of the McKinsey Award for Harvard Business Review’s best article, and the cofounder of four companies, including the innovation consulting firm Innosight. In 2011 and 2013 he was named the world’s most influential business thinker in a biennial ranking conducted by Thinkers50.

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    Reviews for Competing Against Luck

    4.5/5

    36 ratings2 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Hire this book if you're looking to add to your understanding of Jobs To Be Done.

      The topic, Jobs To Be Done (JTBD), has relatively little material available, given its potential impact. Jobs To Be Done is arguably as important if not a more important shift in thinking than Disruptive Innovation, especially for product development and customer happiness.

      The anecdotes were insightful and varied, especially valuable for those in established industries. There are concepts, like little hires and competing against nothing, that will be useful and relevant to online businesses, as well as the realm of physical products. I would love to see those developed in a future book. The takeaways and questions for leaders at the end of each chapter will help busy readers let the main ideas stick.




    • 4/5
      I'm not sure if it's a must-read, but definitely another worthwhile book of business innovation guru Clayton Christensen

    Book preview

    Competing Against Luck - Clayton M. Christensen

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