Turning "Green" Wishes into Products and Services

The whole spectrum for minimizing the impacts of global warming: research and monitoring, saving energy, developing new renewable, non-carbon energy sources, replacing existing energy systems, etc., presents so many opportunities for innovation it might not seem important to analyze the market. But for innovations to be successful, they need to make sense, and these folks are nothing but sensible!

Clayton Christensen, of the Harvard Business School, and his band of merry men and women at Innosight.com, have helped many companies understand the origins and ways to achieve disruptive innovation by formulating potential target markets not as psychographic profiles, or technological advances but in terms of a person's (or company's) "jobs to be done."

Others have been analyzing this approach, too, and one of the first, possibly preceding Christensen, is Strategyn.com, headed by Anthony W. Ulwick. In the May issue of Harvard Business Review (treading on Christensen's own turf!), he and senior consultant Lance A. Bettencourt show how to dissect a job into components that help uncover the specific opportunities for innovation. Their "job map" applies universally, although the time spent on each of the eight steps varies. The central step is the execution step, which is what most people think of as the "job:" performing surgery, for example, or washing one's hands. But before you can do the central step, you need to define or plan what you're going to do, locate or gather materials, prepare, confirm all is ready. And afterwards you need to confirm, adjust, perhaps troubleshoot, prepare for the next iteration.

As you look more closely at each of these steps, you might come up with these questions on your own, but Ulwick and Bettencourt give some suggestions:
* Can the job be executed in a more efficient or effective sequence?
* Do some customers struggle more with executing the job than others (for instance, novices versus experts, older versus younger?)
* Is it possible to eliminate the need for particular inputs or outputs from the job?

And so on. What ideas have we sparked already?