Firms have never known more about their customers, but their innovation processes remain hit-or-miss. Why? According to Christensen and his coauthors, product developers focus too much on building customer profiles and looking for correlations in data. To create offerings that people truly want to buy, firms instead need to home in on the job the customer is trying to get done. Some jobs are little (pass the time); some are big (find a more fulfilling career). When we buy a product, we essentially "hire" it to help us do a job. If it does the job well, we hire it again. If it does a crummy job, we "fire" it and look for something else to solve the problem. Jobs are multifaceted. They're never simply about function; they have powerful social and emotional dimensions. And the circumstances in which customers try to do them are more critical than any buyer characteristics. Consider the experiences of condo developers targeting retirees who wanted to downsize their homes. Sales were weak until the developers realized their business was not construction but transitioning lives. Instead of adding more features to the condos, they created services assisting buyers with the move and with their decisions about what to keep and to discard. Sales took off. The key to successful innovation is identifying jobs that are poorly performed in customers' lives and then designing products, experiences, and processes around those jobs.

No business survives over the long term without reinventing itself. But knowing when to undertake strategic transformation-when to change a company's core products or business model because of impending industry disruption-may be the hardest decision a leader faces. Five interrelated "fault lines" can indicate that the ground beneath a company is unstable and that it's time for radical change. The authors' fault line framework addresses basic issues: whether the business serves the right customers, uses the right performance metrics, is positioned properly in its industry, deploys the correct business model, and has employees and partners who possess the capabilities required for future success. The framework can help executives build a case for change and persuade stakeholders to support the decision. And by identifying gaps between an organization's current state and where it needs to be to continue to thrive, it can inform the vision of how the company must transform. Diagnostic questions and an in-depth look at the health care company Aetna-an organization in the midst of an ambitious transformation effort, where one of the authors (Mark Bertolini) is CEO-illuminate how to detect the fault lines while there's still ample time to respond.

Most executives will admit that their companies don't innovate in a reliable, orderly way. Too many breakthroughs happen only because of serendipity or individual heroism. Great ideas remain locked inside employees' heads, and the concepts that are developed often aren't the most promising. But there is a way to make innovation more systematic--without massive investments, restructuring, or even a single hire. In this article three consultants explain how a company can build a "minimum viable" innovation function, in just three months, by doing the following: Day 1-30: Define your innovation buckets, looking at how much growth innovations in your core can produce and how much will need to come from new-growth initiatives; Day 20-50: Zero in on a few strategic opportunities, after talking to customers to identify growing needs that match your capabilities; Day 20-70: Dedicate a small team to begin developing innovations; Day 45-90: Set up a committee to shepherd projects, borrowing venture capitalists' best practices. Drawing on the experiences of a financial services firm, a water utility, a hospital, and a 100-year-old nonprofit, the authors describe how to use this approach to build systems that ensure that good ideas are encouraged, identified, shared, prioritized, resourced, and developed.