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ANALYZE NEW MARKETS

We believe that new markets are found by discovering populations of “non-consumers” — those who are locked out of a market due to a lack of skills, wealth, access or time — who have important “jobs to do.” A job is simply a problem a customer needs to solve. The most successful offerings target those customers who are frustrated with existing (or non-existing) solutions that do not adequately get the job done.

For example, Kodak’s Brownie camera targeted non-consumers who were locked out of the photography market due to a lack of skills. In the late 19th century, only professional photographers had the skills to make sense of the complexities of the existing photographic equipment. Yet an entire untapped market of consumers had a clear job of “capture and share my memories.” Kodak was able to simplify the technology and enabled the masses to consume in a market they had previously been locked out of, easily getting the job done.

Our field experience has shown that companies rarely lack attractive ideas to create new growth businesses. But they sometimes lack the ability to systematically differentiate high-potential vs. low-potential opportunities, particularly those in uncertain new growth spaces outside of the core business.

This challenge is compounded by the fact that an overwhelming amount of evidence suggests that companies entering into new markets tend to start with the wrong strategy. Although no one would willingly pour money in a fatally flawed strategy, companies time and again make this mistake when they step up investment in a strategy too early.

  • Identify Areas of New Growth – a consulting effort designed to find and capture the “white space,” those areas of untapped potential and non-consumption that can be converted to lucrative growth sectors with the application of a new business model (e.g. revenue model, profit structure, channel strategy).
  • Generate New Ideas – a consulting effort that begins with the consumers’ views of their “jobs-to-be-done” and then looks beyond the product or service opportunities to uncover how changes to the business model may further enable these consumers and non-consumers to complete their job more effectively thus driving new growth.
  • Evaluate Ideas Against Success Patterns – a consulting effort that enables efficient review of an idea’s true potential for disruption against the inherent assumptions and risk that must be tested and overcome.
  • Custom Workshops - help to institutionalize the approach, tools and techniques among key innovation practitioners to ensure the process is not a point-in-time effort but rather a self-sustaining approach to market analysis.