Here’s something worth sitting with: there’s no such thing as a new idea. If something seems new it’s because you haven’t seen it in that place before. But it’s been done.
This article is part of Flip the lens: the series that changes how you see the concepts you thought you’d already figured out.
Take the iPhone. People still call it a new idea.
It wasn’t.
It was a new version of old ideas. PDAs, cameras, phones, computers — all of these were already out there. What changed was that the technology let us take those separate things and fold them into one device.
The Jobs people were hiring those devices to do didn’t change.
The desire to check your calendar on the road, make a call away from your desk, get to your email without a computer all existed a long, long time before Steve Jobs walked onstage. The iPhone didn’t create the Jobs. It changed the solutions available to satisfy them.
And it changed our expectations along the way.
Look at Netflix while you’re at it. People treat streaming like it invented watching a film at home. It didn’t. The Job was always sitting there -”I’ve had a long day, entertain me, help me switch off without leaving the couch”.
We used to hire a trip to the video store for that, then a DVD in the mailbox… then a button on the remote. The solution kept getting faster, cheaper, easier. The Job never moved an inch. Netflix didn’t invent the want. It just got closer to it than anything before it, and once you’ve felt that, you don’t go back.
That distinction is the whole game, and many people tend to skip right over it. Because here’s the thing: nobody’s struggling for something new.
What they are struggling with is making progress.
They’re wrestling with a moment in their day that isn’t working, and they’ll hire whatever gets them through it. They don’t wake up wanting novel or brand new.
Let’s call it what it is – iteration, not innovation
So here’s what I want you to do: unpack the word “new.”
Where’s the threshold? When is something new and when is it not? Is it a new idea or a new solution? Those are two different words, and we treat them like one.
Part of the problem is we don’t slow down to figure out what context we’re even talking about. In innovation, most of what we call innovation is iteration.
It’s refinement sitting on a backbone of decades, sometimes centuries, of knowledge and technology.
Why do we chase ‘new’ so hard?
A few reasons.
Ownership, for one. The patent office exists to judge whether your thing is different enough to protect. Uniqueness, for another. But it all rolls back to economics.
People want new because new is defendable; new sticks out… new lets you charge more.
And here’s the part nobody wants to admit: a lot of “new” is just language. In economics we define things with specialized words. Accounting does the same.
Any specialized field uses language to create the perception of new and unique, because that’s how you control knowledge, separate yourself, and build wealth. But strip the jargon off accounting and it’s arithmetic with a few definitions bolted on.
We dress things up as new to serve our own egos and our own margins.
My own work isn’t new either
The book Greg and I wrote, Demand-Side Sales – is it new? I don’t think so.
People call it refreshing, they call it new. That is because instead of talking about the sales funnel it talks about the buying process.
But it’s Jobs to Be Done, which we’ve been doing for thirty years, flipped into a different space. Same with Jobs itself. That was never birthed out of nowhere.
It came from a struggling moment – I couldn’t understand what people were telling me, and the tools I had didn’t help me build anything. So I borrowed. Need states got me part of the way, and usage and attitudes got me a little further.
Taguchi’s thinking on functions, Deming’s causal structures and right-to-left thinking, some engineering, some marketing, some psychology. I merged them.
To a lot of people it felt new, only because they’d never seen it. It was built on other people’s ideas.
Now, don’t hear me say ideas are cheap.
I used to say ideas are free – everybody’s got a hundred of them, sit in a room and brainstorm and you’ll drown in them. But a thought is not a mechanism. And those brainstormed ideas, the ones we filter and synthesize and get excited about in the room, are usually the most expensive ideas you’ll ever have, because they’re great in the mind and they fall apart in practice.
New to whom? And when?
Here’s where the word really comes apart.
When people tell me the pandemic created new Jobs, I push back. It may have created new struggling moments, but the Jobs already existed. If I didn’t work from home before, that doesn’t mean the desire to work from home didn’t exist — it means it didn’t exist for me.
It existed independently of me, in other places, for other people. The pandemic just dropped a lot more of us into that struggle at the same time.
And working from home isn’t even a Job. It’s a channel. The Job is to be productive, to be seen as someone doing the right things, or to make progress without sitting in the office. When my kid went from a classroom to a laptop at the kitchen table, what I hired the school to do didn’t change – teach him, help him graduate, get him to college.
The delivery changed. The Job didn’t. What changed was whether the old solution still worked, and that’s the moment people start looking for a new one.
So before you call anything new, ask two questions.
New to whom?
And new when?
Nine times out of ten the thing you’re calling new is an old Job wearing a new solution.
Stop selling new
Here’s where I want the thinkers to land. If you’re stuck trying to sell a “new” idea, stop selling new. Nobody’s struggling for something new – remember that.
Chasing unique and different is supply-side thinking. You’re bouncing your idea against the wall of “is this new enough” when you should be bouncing it against a real struggling moment in someone’s life.
Make it better, and people won’t automatically buy. Make it unique, and people won’t automatically buy.
Solve a struggle they’re wrestling with right now, and the newness takes care of itself – it’s a different perspective, sitting on the backbone of everything already invented.
Read the previous article from the Flip the lens series: You can’t persuade anyone to buy.