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The masterclass describes how companies are rapidly moving away from firm-centric views of value to a more customer-centric perspective of how value is created and co-created in an age of ubiquitous connectivity and producer-consumer real-time interaction.

This masterclass focuses on the insights of Harvard marketing expert Thales Teixeira’ book Unlocking the Customer Value Chain: How Decoupling Drives Consumer Disruption.

Professor Teixeira argues that change in consumer behavior, rather than technology, is the primary source of disruption in many industries, particularly in those likely to be most impacted by digitization. By paying close attention to the customer’s value chain, entrepreneurs can spot potential new opportunities for disruption and incumbents can figure out how best to respond to potential challenges.

When delving deeply into the customer value chain for disruptive innovation opportunities, it is important to recognize that customers always pay you with three ‘currencies,’ their money, their time and their effort.

By highlighting the common phenomenon of decoupling and how it operates, Teixeira helps make its disruptive potential more transparent and predictable for both disruptors and incumbents alike. Teixeira’s research identified three different types of decoupling: value-creating decoupling, value-eroding decoupling and value-charging decoupling.

This chapter flips innovation on its head. Instead of validating our ideas in the market, why not facilitate a market already motivated to change to do so. Theoretical and empirical evidence is presented to support this theory, along with tools and techniques enabling Innovation Leaders to deliver radical change. Three case studies are shared showing how successful innovation leaders have researched and developed opportunities for radical innovation.

In demand-driven markets, customer value, sometimes called perceived use value or consumer surplus, is defined by the customer rather than the firm. The value a firm can appropriate, its profits, is driven by the customer’s willingness to pay for the value they receive, adjusted by costs. This paper introduces a conceptual framework that helps understand value creation and appropriation in demand-driven markets and shows how to influence them through strategic decision-making.

This paper uses an axiomatic approach combined with an extended analytical formulation of the jobs-to-be-done framework to contextualise demand-driven markets. It mathematically derives implications for managerial decision-making concerning selecting customer segments, optimising customer value creation and maximising firm value appropriation in a competitive environment.

Rooting strategic decision-making in the jobs-to-be-done framework allows distinguishing between what customers want to achieve (goal), what product attributes need to be satisfied (opportunity space/constraints) and what value creation criteria related to features are important (utility function). This paper shows that starting from a job-to-be-done, the problem of identifying which customer segments to serve, what product to offer and what price to charge, can be formulated as an optimisation problem that simultaneously (rather than sequentially) solves for the three decision variables, customer segments, product features and price, by maximising the value that a firm can appropriate, subject to maximising customer value creation and constrained by the competitive environment.

Applying the derived results to simultaneously deciding which customer segments to target, what product features to offer and what price to charge, given a set of competing products, allows managers to increase their chances of winning the competitive game.

This paper shows that starting from a job-to-be-done and simultaneously focusing on customers, product features, price and competitors enhances firm profitability. Strategic decision-making is formulated as an optimisation problem based on an axiomatic approach contextualising demand-driven markets.

This masterclass examines how customer-centric marketing, using new perspectives developed by Clayton Christensen and others, can guide new product and service innovation. Christensen’s Jobs Theory revolves around the observation that “customers don’t buy products or services,” but rather “pull them into their lives to make progress” in some way that is particularly valuable to them.”

Two recent books are discussed in detail– Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice (2016), by Christensen and co-authors Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon and David Duncan and Sense & Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously (2017) by design and innovation experts, Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden

In coming to view innovation through the lens of Jobs Theory, what you see is not so much the customer at the center of the innovation universe, but “the customer’s Job to Be Done,”which “may seem like a small distinction, but, in reality, “it changes everything.”

Identifying a well-defined Job to Be Done offers a kind of innovation blueprint which is different’ from the traditional marketing concept of “needs” because of the ‘much higher degree of specificity required to identify precisely what it is you are trying to solve for in particular use-case contexts.

When applied astutely, the concept of “Job to Be Done”can improve a company’s track record at new product or service introduction. For the first time it gives managers and other corporate leaders a guidebook for making innovation initiatives more likely to be successful.

There is a significant pressure on consulting businesses to produce innovative solutions and to assist their clients in producing innovative solutions for their organizational problems as well. In addition to that challenging need to innovate for survival and competition, as other contemporary firms, consultancies must face the global changes brought by the outbreak of the coronavirus infection since 2019. This qualitative pilot study aimed at exploring the impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on the approaches to innovation in the consulting industry.

Triggered from the literature gap on approaches to innovation in consultancies during the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, a grounded theory approach was used to generate a theoretical explanation of how the COVID-19 is affecting the strategies and approaches of businesses in harnessing innovation opportunities from the perspectives of four professionals from an information technology (IT) consultancy in the USA.

The findings of this pilot study showed that organizational leaders' increased responsiveness, a Job-To-Be-Done strategy, organizational support and team adaption are the keys to harvesting dynamic capabilities for better competition, even during global environmental changes.

This implies that managers remain the main actors in a firm's efforts to harvest dynamic capabilities. Innovation strategists, business leaders and policymakers can confidently work together to implement novel and flexible work settings that integrate both social and economic advancements.

Theoretical implications support the sustainable innovation strategy concepts and the Job-To-Be-Done theory. Finally, the substantive theory from this pilot study lays the ground for future research on approaches to innovation in the consulting industry.

The purpose of this paper is to satisfy a clear gap in the main field of open innovation research whereabouts a very little scholarship try to analyze the mechanisms of innovative milieu down smart cities environments by applying through innovative projects that seem to support efficiently the entry of private firms and citizens in public collaborations.

The research performed an exploratory and qualitative evaluation based on the case study method built on the evaluation of organizational behavior and urban boosting innovation through smart city initiatives. In doing so, after a literature review in smart city as well in lean methodology fields, the case of Turin Smart City follows.

As acknowledged by international literature, the paper shows how a lean approach enables local government to define and realize smart projects and initiatives in a faster and more effective way. Particularly, the government in one of the main cities in Italy, id est Turin, combines a lean methodology with the job-to-be done approach, according a new concept of smart initiatives involving a startup mentality for the lead users which enables interesting predictions relating the human aspects of open collaborations.

The specificity of this inquiry highlights valuable insights from double-gate smart cities’ innovation, social and urban as well. The research is largely interpretative and exploratory and while this provides a solid scientific foundation for further research, it does not, itself, subject any hypothesis to statistical testing and validation.

Since the city approached the smart city subject in a lean way, it was able to realize some projects in a faster way. Through specific initiatives, the city acquires the ability to involve more and better all its stakeholders such as citizens, companies, and public employees, among others. In this regard, the paper invigorates managerial debates concerning the urban and social aspects of open innovation ecosystems which represent in our minds a superior level of open innovation, testbeds of positive knowledge, and stimulus of knowledge dissemination process around the city.

Firms offering a variety of disruptive innovations – for example, Craigslist.com – are successfully undercutting the traditional newspaper business model; this paper aims to describe a unique mode of counterattack.

The American Press Institute (API) recognized that the transformation taking place in the newspaper industry was a textbook example of disruptive innovation, as described by strategist Clayton Christensen. Working with Christensen and his colleagues at the consulting firm Innosight, API developed a counter‐offensive program customized to the issues and changes facing newspaper companies.

The paper finds that the Newspaper Next Game Plan is essentially a strategic framework designed to enable newspaper organizations to structure and prioritize their approach to both the core business and the disruptive innovation opportunities that will drive long‐term success and growth.

API's newspaper‐centric version of the innovation methodology focuses on researching the needs, that is, the “jobs to be done,” of discrete sets of non‐users of the core products.

The paper offers a helpful guide for any industry beset by disruptive innovation. For the newspaper industry there is a radical lesson: serving non‐readers will require newspapers to build audiences by fulfilling “jobs to be done” that go beyond the core function of reporting the news.

Companies recently have begun to look for ways to help make value pioneering more systematic and repeatable. This “Masterclass” paper aims to examine one of the first frameworks for making value innovation an effective, manageable practice, an approach practiced by Mark W. Johnson.

This “Masterclass” paper shows how Johnson's framework for mapping the “basic architecture underlying all successful businesses” can be understood in terms of four main elements of the business model.

A degree of creativity and a willingness to experiment, pilot and adjust as you go, remains part of the business model innovation process, the author found, but Johnson's four‐element framework can serve to “bring the discipline of architecture” to the process, and provide a structure on which “a manageable” and more repeatable innovation activity can be pursued.

The paper explains how to go about developing an innovative business model. The process starts with finding an important unfilled job‐to‐be‐done, and the key to this step is to look at the world of the customer “in a new way” from the outside in rather than through the lens of current products or approaches to segmentation. Thus, the same customer may turn out to have different unfilled jobs‐to‐be‐done in the same product/service category at different times and in different personal contexts.

Johnson highlights three opportunity types – the white space within, the white space beyond and the white space between, and he identifies a different strategy for pursuing each one.

Describes how Agile teams can use strategic management tools and processes to discover market-creating innovations.

The related article “The next frontier for Agile: strategic management” in the previous issue of Strategy & Leadership explored the theory and possibilities of enterprise-wide Strategic Agility, a combination of Agile mindset and processes with strategic management theory to produce continuous market-creating innovation. This second installment offers insights from noted practitioners about implementing it.

The strategic concepts of Kim & Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy, Clayton Christensen’s Job to Be Done theory and Curt Carlson’s SRI Playbook – Need, Approach, Benefits per costs and Competition (NABC) can be adopted by Agile teams seeking innovations that create new customer value.

Identifying a well-defined Job to Be Done produces the start of an innovation blueprint which is unlike the traditional marketing concept of “needs” because of the much higher degree of specificity required to identify precisely what problem your potential solution would address.

Using strategic management concepts, Agile teams can redefine how needs are being met and in the process, discover value for customers from offering something or doing something that the company or the industry currently doesn’t provide.

IN view of the ever‐increasing application of time and motion study techniques in this country it is difficult to understand why so few manufacturers of time and labour‐saving equipment advertise the very items required by work study engineers.