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Something strange happened at the gym last week. I was in the locker room recovering from a workout and a strong, familiar scent filled the room. No, it wasn’t the usual gym locker room smell. It was sweet and fruity and, for some reason, it made me feel young.

I wasn’t the only person to notice the smell. Like prairie dogs, women popped their heads up looking for the source. After a few seconds of searching, we found it: Two bright pink bottles of Salon Selectives shampoo and conditioner.

“Salon Selectives! I haven’t seen that in years!” 

“I thought they stopped making that!”

“I used to love the smell of that!”

The chatter started almost instantly and every comment was positive. Women talked about the smell, the bottles, and the fact that no girls’ toiletry kit in the late 1980s was complete without those green-apple scented pink bottles.

It’s not often that shampoo evokes such excitement, which may indicate that Salon Selectives has tapped into something overlooked by many products: It is is meeting either an unmet or under-satisfied job-to-be-done. But with hundreds, maybe even thousands, of hair care products on the market, what job could possibly be left undone?

The answer probably lies in the first reactions of the women in the locker room: Remember simple pleasures and happy moments.

Hair care products today address every possible functional job-to-be-done: Give volume to thin hair, decrease frizziness in curly hair, preserve color in dyed hair…the list goes on and on. Brands position themselves to address many of our social jobs (those jobs related to how others perceive us) by showing us celebrities and models with stunningly beautiful and healthy hair, with the implicit promise that, with proper shampoo choice, our lives will be equally fabulous. But very few hair products or brands address our emotional jobs (those solely focused on the user).

The importance of marrying emotional jobs with social and functional jobs is something we often stress with clients and something that River West Brands (owners of Salon Selectives) and similar firms tap into when they buy the brand equity (and little else) of a dead or dying business. These companies use the power of our memories and the associations we make with a brand to meet our emotional jobs-to-be-done. Then they can update it to meet the functional jobs-to-be-done of today’s consumers. Finally, through the positioning and marketing of the brand, the company can address our social jobs, delivering the trifecta that often leads to brand success.

Combining memories with products and brands that meet important functional, social and emotional jobs-to-be-done can be extremely powerful. Perhaps, if that prairie-dog reaction to the Salon Selectives bottles in the gym is any indication, powerful enough to bring a dead brand back to life. 

The GM Volt blog posted an interview yesterday with Chevrolet brand manager Ed Peper in which he discussed work Innosight is doing with GM for the Volt launch. When asked, Do you have a plan on how to educate the public to understand the car since its so unique in order to make it more readily salable? he answered:

"We're actually doing a lot of work right now to understand in general who the consumer is for this product. We're working with a group that’s based out of Harvard and there a company called Innosight. What their working with us on is developing a jobs-based positioning for Volt. Which means what are the jobs that Volt really needs to handle for the consumers that buy them. On an emotional level, on a social level, on a functional level, what are the jobs that this vehicle must perform and must do well. Were in the process right now. We’ve done a couple of focus groups. We have a lot of data that you and others have provided us. And its going to help us from a marketing standpoint, what things should we talk about, what things shouldn’t we talk about. And how to we best present the category buster. How do we present this in such a way that consumers who are interested will know this is the first of its kind and this will be the best of its kind and it will be the only one of its kind when it hits the market place in 2010."

Well, one commenter wrote that my sentence-long analysis of Nokia's acquisition of Symbian in this post was too simplistic. I agree. Innosight Senior Partner Steve Wunker, who worked at Psion in the 1990s, had the following thoughts:

Ten years ago, a bevy of companies shocked the communications industry when they announced the formation of Symbian—a for-profit consortium that would transform the PDA software of Britain’s Psion PLC into a platform powering high-end smartphones.

Back then, these smartphones were gleams in engineers’ eyes (the first—Ericsson’s Project Pamela—was the size of a small book and never commercially produced). But, almost unanimously, industry analysts foresaw them taking over the premium tiers of the mobile market and requiring a common software platform for the third party developers who would create the applications that users would demand. At its peak in August 2000, equity markets valued Symbian at nearly $10 billion.

This week, Nokia bought out the remaining shareholders of Symbian for about $410 million, and immediately declared it would give away the software code to a non-profit Symbian Foundation.

Was this tumble because Symbian produced a bad product? Not at all. By most measures—system reliability, power consumption, etc.—Symbian’s mobile operating system is the best on the market.

Rather, the world changed in ways very few industry analysts expected. A decade ago, intelligent people reasoned that the processing power of the mobile would start catching up to PCs, and so people would start to demand PC-like functionality on their phones. Moreover, the mobility of the phone would lead to many unique applications being developed for this platform.

Read the rest on Scott's Harvard Business blog, Innovation Insights.

A Wall Street Journal article yesterday described how Android—a mobile phone operating system pushed by Google and more than 30 partners—is encountering some unforeseen difficulties.

These struggles aren’t actually that surprising. Chapters 5 and 6 of The Innovator’s Solution describe how pushing performance boundaries almost always requires that a single company control critical interfaces.

Google its partners are betting they can create a modular mobile phone operating system that anyone can pick up and use. They hope that Android makes it simple and cheap for third-party developers to encourage the use of the Internet on mobile devices, which will result in more advertising revenue for Google.

However, the Android team is still fine-tuning the operating system. Developers report being frustrated because they no sooner optimize an application for Android than the operating system changes. Getting a single Android-powered phone out the door for T-Mobile USA is sucking up almost all of Google’s Android-related resources.

Imagine how different it would be if Google was aggressively pushing its own phone forward (which it very well might be doing behind the scenes).

Read the rest on Scott's Harvard Business blog, Innovation Insights.

Statements like “the Dell, Wal-Mart, or Southwest of new industry x” always get us excited because they indicate that an entrant has shifted the focus of innovation efforts from the product to the business model.

Not that there’s anything wrong with technology-based product innovation – it is, of course, essential. But it is also a gamble; pursuing product-driven innovation alone means that you’ll be entrenched in a fierce competitive battle because it is relatively easy to frame a challenge in technological terms. Changing the basis of competition by innovating the business model – as Dell did with PCs, Wal-Mart with retail, and Southwest with air travel – has historically increased the odds for breakthrough success.

That’s why it caught our attention when Fortune’s Green Wombat blog labeled Berkeley-based solar start-up Sungevity the “Dell of solar energy.” Solar power has been red hot, aflame with technological advances and billions of dollars in investment. Getting business model innovation right in this context promises enormous success.

Has Sungevity gotten it right? For starters, their tagline, “faster, easier, affordable solar,” is as close to Disruptive Innovation 101 as you can get. As loyal readers of this blog know, disruption is fueled by companies delivering on speed and convenience, ease of use and de-specialization, cost and accessibility. Doing so removes barriers to consumption, enabling large swaths of consumers who were otherwise locked out of a market to participate – non-consumers, in disruptive innovation terms. And there are certainly a lot of nonconsumers of solar power…just think of all the unused rooftop real estate out there.

Sungevity is looking to put solar panels on those barren roofs. The company is a solar installer; they take the panels produced by giants like SunPower, Evergreen Solar, and BP Solar, affix them to rooftops, and connect them to the grid. This final step in the value chain has, predictably, been beset by inefficiency and variability up until now, because it depends on all too human factors like the availability of good installers who know what they’re doing.

The flock of solar installers that have emerged in recent years are seeking to centralize and simplify this complex and potentially frustrating process. Economies of scale give any company a natural advantage over the independent contractors they compete with, but Sungevity’s clever web-based interface is what really sets the company apart.  The company asks visitors to their site to enter their home address, and then uses software and satellite imagery to come up with customized quotes that outline what a solar power system would cost and what it would produce. This estimate makes the system planning process quick and easy by obviating initial site visits from a contractor.

Crucially, moving the quotation process to the web figures to lower the bar for potential customers who are not yet intent on installing systems. Instead of taking time out of the day to accommodate a sales visit, people can simply plug in a few numbers online. There’s no commitment, no investment, no contractors marching around on your roof who’ll be disappointed when you tell them that you’re not yet ready to commit to laying down $10,000 for the panels.

In addition to mapping out a custom-designed system for your rooftop, the nifty Sungevity site also projects install costs and lifetime energy and cost savings. The site produces images of your house decked out with solar panels and then allows you to enter a credit card number to make the purchase on the spot. In the words of CNET’s Greentech blog, the customer-friendly web interface “reduc[es] a complex sale into a quick online exchange.”  As easy as customizing and purchasing a PC, right?

Innovative service-oriented business models like Sungevity’s that are just now emerging will spur the development of the solar power industry, enabling it to maintain its blistering pace of growth while reaching more and more of mainstream America. When you factor in other clever business model innovations such as solar financing and the cost reductions and efficiency improvements that will emerge from the technological arms race underway in the industry, the picture starts to look very sunny indeed.

By Kai Itameri-Kinter

That perennial right of passage, the EU backpacking trip, has long spawned dreams of cultural enlightenment and younger drinking ages in youthful minds across America, thanks to budget airfares and Europe-on-a-shoestring guides. Recently, a company called Sandeman’s has put such trips within reach of even the smallest budget with free walking tours of major European cities. These tours are powerful disruptors because they not only overcome a major barrier to consumption and address a real “job to be done,” (cheap entertainment, socializing, etc), they also excel against competitors who overshoot the bottom tier of the tourist market.

Comfortable bus tours with professional guides and high ticket prices are great products, but likely not worth the cost for low-budget student travelers, who are unattractive to larger firms focused on these high-margin products. These overshot customers pose a disruptive opportunity for less professional yet comfortable free walking tours that are likely “good enough.” Free tours also create potential further growth, because young students may not be the only tourists with cash constraints and similar desires. Addressing their needs may help uncover overlooked opportunities elsewhere and span traditionally segmented market demographics.

You may ask, how does a free tour make money?  Here, real innovation has occurred in devising a business model that attracts customers, who are then encouraged to give tips once they receive a great product, or in this case, a great experience. Payment by tips also provides the student guides a real incentive to perform. These guides, who don’t require the stability of a set salary, are essentially willing to work at no cost to the company. However, even more profit comes from directing tourists to certain restaurants with mid-tour lunch break specials, and to certain pubs for pub crawls at a set price. These attract the kid who was likely going to go out anyway and wants to hang out with the new friends he met on the tour.  More sophisticated options like this illustrate the opportunity for low-end disruptors to move up-market and continue to take business away from established, overshooting competitors.

Sandeman’s and firms like it (such as Harvard’s Unofficial Tours) have taken a cue from their student customers, who have long understood the value of work that is simply good enough (think last-minute papers just meeting the length requirement). This allows them to create an appropriate model that overcomes a major barrier to consumption and establishes a foothold for future growth, while keeping competitors off-balance and unlikely to respond to seemingly inferior offerings.

The last couple of years haven’t been kind to former disruptive poster-child Sony. Yet the company has taken a series of actions that could position it to return to disruptive prominence.

What has Sony done? Is the company about to introduce new products or services that could be the building blocks of billion-dollar businesses? Not exactly. Sony has done something more prosaic—it got its core businesses under control.

It’s odd to suggest that this has anything to do with innovation, but in fact it's a vital part of the process. As we discuss in the first chapter of our new book The Innovator’s Guide to Growth, a core business that is in control is one of several necessary precursors to innovation.

Why? Well, when your core business isn’t in control, unexpected crises inevitably pop up. When those crises hit, managers necessarily and appropriately divert attention from growth initiatives toward making sure that the core business doesn’t go down the tubes.

That's what happened to Sony. From the mid 1950s to the early 1980s, Sony was an unstoppable innovation machine. It systematically launched about a dozen disruptive product lines, including the transistor radio and the Walkman.

But since the 80s, Sony’s innovation engine has suffered a long, gentle decline. It introduced innovative products like its Vaio line of notebook computers and its PlayStation line of video game consoles, but it rarely pioneered new markets.

Read the rest at Scott's Harvard Management blog.

One of the trickiest bits of the disruptive innovation puzzle comes once a company launches or acquires a disruptive business: How to integrate the new venture into the parent company while protecting what made it work in the first place. We refer to it as “avoiding institutional antibodies” — making sure that entrenched rules or nit-picking comments (“…But we don’t do it that way!”) don’t prematurely kill innovation efforts.

An article in the New York Times a couple weeks ago gave a surprising example of successful institutional antibody avoidance. Disney and Pixar: The Power of the Prenup outlined the various ways those two wildly divergent companies have worked to maintain the spirit of Pixar since their 2006 merger.

“When Disney bought its rival, Pixar, in 2006 for $7.4 billion, many people assumed the deal would play out like most big media takeovers: abysmally,” wrote Brooks Barnes in the June 1 article. “The worries were twofold: that either Disney would trample Pixar’s esprit de corps (turning Mr. Lasseter into a drone, chanting “Hi Ho” en route to Mickey’s animation mines) or that Pixar animators would act like spoiled brats and rebuke their new owner.”

In fact, so far the companies seem to be getting on well, and Disney’s stock has made welcome gains in recent months. Some of the successful tactics Barnes described include drafting an explicit statement of what would not change at Pixar, including the retention of superior benefits packages, no contracts and no move from Emeryville to Burbank. Meanwhile, the company has conceded to Disney’s push for sequels to popular movies like Cars, ramping up its production schedule and outsourcing some animation.

It should give others who are facing the institutional antibodies challenge hope: If Disney and Pixar — who spent years before the merger embroiled in personality clashes and combat over partnership deals — can make it work, anyone can.

Believe it or not, gardening is the number one outdoor activity, ahead of both walking and golf. There are several barriers locking the average consumer out of gardening as a hobby – it is time consuming and can be overwhelming for the newcomer who doesn’t know an annual from a perennial. So how did an activity with so many potential barriers to consumption become so popular?

A primary driver of the increase of the popularity of gardening is the advent of innovative packaging and products that break down these "barriers to consumption" by making it simpler and more fun to spend time in the yard. Scott’s MiracleGrow Liquafeed is a great example of such a product; it is a hose-and-bottle system that automatically combines water and plant food (see picture).It is not a better version of plant food, but it is a packaging innovation. It makes it simple and idiot-proof for the novice gardener to easily feed and water their outdoor plants. My bet is this product is mainly enjoyed by people who previously wouldn’t use fertilizers or even spend much time doing yard work. This is described nicely in this quote from Scott’s Miracle-Grow's CEO, Jim Hagedorn: "Our biggest competitor is people's time. We have to make it easy and fun for people to work in the garden."

A little bit of research turned up what I had suspected to be true. Liquafeed was the most successful new product launch in the history of Scott’s. It increased sales in the fertilizer category by 11 percent. First-year sales were $50 million, making it the most successful new product launch for the company ever (while projected sales were $20 million). The key to the innovation is the packaging, which was developed in partnership with Calmar, a MeadWestvaco company.

The key thing to remember here is that innovation requires looking beyond improving a product along the traditional dimensions of performance (in the case of plant food these might be things like increase in chlorophyll production or improved heat and cold tolerance) and using other innovation levers to break down the barriers locking out potential consumers from using your product!

The brilliant mock documentary This Is Spinal Tap is filled with pitch-perfect one-liners. One of my favorites is the gem from the fake heavy metal band's lead singer and bassist, David St. Hubbins and Derek Smalls, who team up to deliver this wisdom: "It's such a fine line between stupid and...clever.”

It is. And for innovation-seeking companies, the fine line relates to “core competencies.”

Core competencies, or things your company does extremely well, are beautiful, wonderful things. Companies should find every way possible to use core competencies to disarm existing competitors, edge into adjacent markets, and create entirely new growth businesses.

But, core competencies can be core rigidities as well. A fixed view of core competencies can cause companies to pass on great growth opportunities, or completely miss emerging attackers. It is one of the key drivers of the innovator’s dilemma. ...

Read the rest at Scott's Harvard Management blog, Innovation Insights.

This post is coauthored by Innosight Managing Director Matt Eyring.

Seeing coverage of this week’s baseball draft made us realize how much companies can learn about innovation from watching how great baseball teams manage their early portfolio of talent.

Baseball teams have to assemble the best talent possible, just like companies have to bet on the best innovation opportunities. A baseball team chooses between acquiring talent on the free agent market or drafting and building talent. A company chooses between acquisitions or organic growth.

Acquisitions are expensive, but perceived to be lower risk, because the talent (or idea) has proven itself demonstrably in the marketplace (for baseball, that means success on a major-league diamond). Organic growth is typically cheaper, but perceived to be risky because many times highly touted initiatives or prospects don’t pan out.

Baseball teams know that talent follows a power-law pattern, where for every 1,000 players there are 100 players that are capable of playing at major league levels, 10 of whom are legitimately good players, and 1 of whom is a true superstar. The same is true for innovation.

The challenge is: Which project or which player? Just as a baseball team doesn’t have complete information about what a player’s true level of ability is on draft day, you don’t know the real potential of any one innovation project.

Both of you are forced to deal with incomplete data. A team has to rely on a mix of limited performance data at the high school and college level and an assessment of a player’s inherent skills. Good teams collect as much data as possible. They have sophisticated models to project how rough performance can project to the major league level. Good teams also let past patterns inform their decisions. High school pitchers? Very risky. College hitters? Much less risky.

With a well-organized scouting team, you should gather multiple data points in preparation to “draft” innovation opportunities. Get the very best market data you can, look at past successes and failures to see what lessons you can glean, and use qualitative metrics or patterns to guide decisions. ...

Read the rest at Scott's Harvard Management blog, Innovation Insights.

In almost all companies, market research is a critical part of the innovation process. Market research helps companies identify attractive opportunity areas, compare innovation initiatives, and fine-tune their strategic approach. It’s a pity then that companies frequently stumble when using market research to guide innovation decisions.

It’s not that market researchers are bad people. Almost all the market researchers I have met are good, thoughtful people. The tools of market research are—when used properly—good, useful tools. But something comes off the rails when innovation-seeking companies organize, execute, and use market research.

The four biggest flaws I see with traditional market research approaches are:

1. Talking to the wrong customers. It’s been more than a decade since Clayton Christensen described how the root of the innovator’s dilemma is a myopic focus on the most demanding customers in the market. Yet, many companies still spend a disproportionate amount of their time trying to understand the wants and needs of existing, demanding customers. Innovation opportunities almost always come from understanding a company’s worst customers or customers it doesn’t serve.

2. Asking the wrong questions. Many companies will ask customers, in essence, “What do you want?” Academics and practitioners more eloquent than I have described how customers can’t reliably answer that question. The focus has to be on the problem the customer is facing—and even that can be tricky because customers can’t always articulate problems that aren’t directly targeted by existing solutions. ...

Read the rest at Scott's Harvard Management blog, Innovation Insights.