Anthony W. Ulwick

Employing a Sustaining Strategy

A sustaining strategy is good for products or services that get the job done just slightly better and/or more cheaply. We define “slightly” as less than 5% better or cheaper. New market entrants should avoid a sustaining strategy, as they will not be offering anything enticing enough to lure customers away en masse from a favorite brand or product. The risk is too high to make a switch. Customers generally will only switch to a new product if it gets the job done upwards of 20% better—which is characteristic of a differentiated or dominant strategy. Here again, using desired outcome statements as the basis for evaluating whether or not a product will get the job done better (and how much better) is a critical step in bringing data-driven decision making to the innovation process.
Sustaining innovation is a good strategy for an incumbent to follow to maintain market position, market share, and margins. In established markets, getting the job done slightly better and slightly more cheaply lets a company take share from a competitor.

The Jobs-to-be-Done Growth Strategy Matrix reveals which growth strategies are available for a company to pursue in a given situation.

As I shall show in the next chapter, the qualitative and quantitative research methods included in the Outcome- Driven Innovation process secure the information that is needed to determine what situation a company is in.

Once a company knows what under- or overserved segments exist and what customer needs are under- and overserved, it is in a position to use the matrix to select the best strategy for pursuit. Without this ability, innovation remains a game of chance.

PROCESS

4.
OUTCOME DRIVEN-INNOVATION

A company’s success at innovation is dependent on the innovation process it choses to employ. A process fraught with defects and deficiencies will produce unpredictable results.

When it comes to creating an effective innovation process, cobbling together a hodgepodge of incompatible practices and relying on qualitative insights alone just doesn’t work. What companies need is a comprehensive, customer-centric, data-driven innovation process that is built around Jobs Theory. That is why the Strategyn team and I have spent the last 25 years creating and refining our Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI) process. ODI rids the innovation process of its deficiencies.

While Jobs-to-be-Done is the theory, Outcome-Driven Innovation is the process that puts it into practice.

ODI is a strategy and innovation process that enables companies to conceptualize and invent new solutions that help customers get a job done better and/or more cheaply. It has an 86 percent success rate because it begins with a deep understanding of the Job-to-be-Done and employs unique quantitative research methods that enable companies to analyze markets in ways that have never before been possible.

More specifically, ODI links a company’s value creation activities to customer-defined performance metrics related to the job they are trying to get done—a truly revolutionary concept in the field.


By supplying a definition of customer needs that the entire organization can embrace, ODI offers a rigorous, controlled approach to needs gathering, needs-based segmentation, competitive analysis, opportunity identification, idea generation and validation, market sizing, and the formulation of market and product strategy. The result is a predictable approach to innovation.


As shown in the figure, the Outcome-Driven Innovation process is comprised of 10 key steps.
The ODI process begins with a definition of the customer and ends with a market and product strategy that creates value for that customer.

This chapter outlines the process we use and the steps that we take to turn Jobs Theory into practice.

1.