All too often fitness centers, medical providers, colleges, and organizations in many other industries seek to distinguish themselves only on the quality, convenience, and experience of what they sell, say the authors. It's not that those things aren't important. But they matter only as means to the ends that people seek. Too many organizations lose sight of this truth. Even when they do promote what they sell in relation to consumers' aspirations, they rarely design solutions that allow people to realize them. Instead, individuals must cobble together what they think they need to achieve their goals--for example, a trainer, a particular diet, and a support network to lose weight. Enterprises should recognize the economic opportunity offered by the transformation business, in which consumers come to them with a desire to improve some fundamental aspect of their lives. Even though we're all filled with hopes, aims, and ambitions, significant change is incredibly hard to accomplish on our own. This article offers an approach to designing a transformation business.

Marketing needs a new mindset to fulfill its proper role in creating and sustaining strategic advantage. To extend its influence beyond the boundaries of current offerings, the firm, and conventional practice, marketing and markets must be viewed through a service lens. This lens allows marketing to take a lead role in assisting the enterprise to become an enabler of value co-creation by customers who have jobs to be done. This article offers four new premises to guide marketing thought and practice and draw out implications of these premises for achieving and sustaining strategic advantage.

Increasingly, service innovation is a source of competitive differentiation for product-dominant companies such as manufacturers, distributors, and retailers. However, the relative intangibility of services has led to uncertainty concerning how to apply product innovation expertise to the services space. We argue that meaningful service innovation by a product-dominant company must begin with the recognition that services are solutions to customer needs. As such, the primary goal of a product-dominant company seeking service innovation should not be to innovate service. Rather, it should be to help customers get a specific job done better or to help them get more jobs done. To this end, we offer three approaches for companies seeking new service innovation based on how customers define value.

The secret to true service innovation lies in shifting focus away from the service solution back to the customer. Rather than asking, "How are we doing?" managers must ask, "How is the customer doing?" For far too many businesses, service innovation means making incremental improvements to existing services. While a focus on improving current services certainly has its place, we indicate that this has constrained firms' innovation capabilities by limiting new ideas. In order to truly innovate, firms must expand their focus beyond existing services and service capabilities to address the fundamental needs of their customers, including the jobs and outcomes those customers are trying to achieve. By further focusing service innovation on developing shared solutions with customers, firms are better able to create breakthrough service offerings and processes. This will result in value co-creation that is both meaningful to customers and uniquely differentiated from competitive offerings. To this end, we present a four-step process for firms to guide job-centric service innovation.

No investment in innovation is ever a sure bet. Typically, innovation success rates are low, and returns are slow to materialize-if they're generated at all. This makes innovation initiatives hard to justify when money is tight. But even then, it's still possible to launch new offerings that excite customers. The trick is to find the promising assets you already have in hand. According to strategy consultant Lance Bettencourt and consumer-products executive Scott Betten-court, almost every company has previous discoveries with overlooked market potential. The six most common types of in-hand innovations include products that failed to launch because of particular circumstances, which may have changed since then; previously developed capabilities and features addressing customer needs that have recently risen in prominence; products that customers like for unexpected reasons and that could take off if repositioned; extras created for bundled offerings that could be spun out as stand-alone products; separate components that could be combined into an enhanced offering; and overdesigned products that could be simplified to help the company reach new customer segments. With such innovations, much of the work has already been done. They can be brought to market with relatively minimal effort, resources, and risk and swiftly boost a company's bottom line.

We all know that people "hire" products and services to get a job done. Surgeons hire scalpels to dissect soft tissue. Janitors hire soap dispensers and paper towels to remove grime from their hands. To find ways to innovate, it's critical to deconstruct the job the customer is trying to get done from beginning to end, to gain a complete view of all the points at which a customer might desire more help from a product or service. A methodology called job mapping helps companies analyze the biggest drawbacks of the products and services customers currently use and discover opportunities for innovation. It involves breaking down the task the customer wants to accomplish into the eight universal steps of a job: (1) defining the objectives, (2) locating the necessary inputs, (3) preparing the physical environment, (4) confirming that everything is ready, (5) executing the task, (6) monitoring its progress, (7) making modifications as necessary, and (8) concluding the job. Job mapping differs substantively from process mapping in that the goal is to identify what customers are trying to get done at every step, not what they are doing currently. For example, when an anesthesiologist checks a monitor during a surgical procedure, the action taken is just a means to the end. Detecting a change in patient vital signs is the job the doctor is trying to get done. Within each of the discrete steps lie multiple opportunities for making the job simpler, easier, or faster. By mapping out every step of the job and locating those opportunities, companies can discover new ways to differentiate their offerings.

Eager to grow through innovation, companies are looking to customers to guide them toward unmet needs. But these entities often end up with vague, unusable -- or even misleading -- customer input. Why? The authors studied 10,000 customer need statements from many industries and discovered that companies have not even established a definition of what a customer need is or how user input should be standardized in terms of structure and format. Too often, companies ask customers to react to potential solutions, rather than zeroing in on their expertise: the "job" they need to accomplish with the product or service, and at which steps that experience could use improvement. By deconstructing the job, companies can identify opportunities that are universal and long-standing. In addition, the authors say, companies can collect data that fits their innovation strategy. What the authors propose is a disciplined process for gathering customer requirements that will then be addressed by innovative ideas. They outline the six characteristics that a useful customer statement must possess, including measuring value strictly from a user's perspective -- and not from the factors the company believes should form the basis for the customer's evaluation. The most helpful statements also prompt a clear course of action, specifying what dimensions of the "job" need improvement, such as its sluggish pace or inconsistent quality. The authors set forth six rules for eliciting feedback that will yield the right raw data to craft customer statements that resonate across company functions, so that departments can unite around a single growth strategy. Finally, they define the two broad categories of customer requirements -- job statements and desired-outcome statements -- and link which type works best for different innovation strategies. For CEOs, the authors' message is forthright: Successful innovation is about process, not just the result of brainstorming good ideas.