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The Disruptive Voice explores the theories of disruptive innovation across a broad set of industries and circumstances with academics, researchers, and practitioners who have been inspired and taught by Harvard Business School Professor Clayton M. Christensen, the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration and one of the world’s top experts on growth and innovation. 


For more information, email fgi@hbs.edu or visit www.hbs.edu/forum-for-growth-and-innovation 


BSSE = Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise, Professor Clayton M. Christensen's signature course at the Harvard Business School and a breeding ground for many of the ideas shared in this podcast.

Dec 20, 2022

In an earlier episode of The Disruptive Voice, Pontus Sirén discussed the Jobs methodology and how it relates to customer centricity. Companies exist to address customer problems, i.e. their Jobs To Be Done – and the first critical step for any innovator is to identify a good problem to solve. In this episode, Pontus’ Innosight colleague, Shari Parvarandeh, joins him to not only delve deeper into the importance of having a customer-centric approach but also to highlight that as Jobs arise in the lives of customers, they are compelled to make trade-off decisions. While the Jobs methodology enables companies to more deeply understand the progress that customers are trying to make, trade-off analysis enables them to systematically develop customer Jobs-centric solutions. Of further note is that, for companies, trade-offs are the linchpin of strategy, and they must constantly innovate to develop new and distinctive trade-off equations. Mastering this discipline is indispensable because, in the long run, companies succeed by continuously developing differentiated solutions with compelling trade-offs. Drawing on a number of real world examples to bring these ideas to life, this conversation sheds new light on how, through changing from a mindset of customer centricity to one of customers’ Jobs centricity, companies can innovate in more predictable and systematic ways.