Mark Twain once said there’s no such thing as a new idea.
When Greg threw that quote at me on the Circuit Breaker podcast, my first reaction was: yes. That’s true.
Everything’s built on top of something else. There is a degree of change to something, but there’s always a base foundation.
Sometimes it’s taking things from one industry to another industry – it seems like it’s new, but it’s been done before in some other place. True innovation, in some cases, requires a new perspective on something, but it’s usually built from somewhere else. In innovation, a lot of times it’s iteration more than it is innovation.
It’s not a new idea… it’s a new version of other ideas.
Take the iPhone. Greg said it cleanly: there were PDAs, computers, phones, cameras. The technology advances allowed us to create a new version of those things; a singular device.
It’s not truly a new idea, it’s a new version of other ideas.
And here’s the more important point.
The Jobs that the iPhone satisfies – those Jobs existed before. The desire to have access to a calendar on the road. The desire to make calls away from a landline. The desire to access email without sitting at a computer.
The iPhone was simply a new tool, enabled by technology advancements, for people to take those jobs and satisfy them through one device as opposed to separate devices. The Jobs existed. The change to a new product didn’t change the Jobs. It changed the solutions that were available to satisfy the Jobs.
That’s the core of what we mean by Jobs to be Done. The Job is stable; it’s the solution changes.
Why do we say “new” anyway?
So if it’s all derivatives, why do we put so much weight on having new ideas?
Part of it is ownership, uniqueness – the whole notion of the patent office, saying I have a new method, a new way, new knowledge that nobody else can have access to.
There is a judge of new. But the fact is, they’re all derivatives of something. Ultimately it has to go back to economics. People are looking for something new meaning it has to be defensible, has to be different enough from everybody else that we can stick out.
Greg added something worth sitting with: language is a huge problem in this regard. Specialized language gives people a way to control knowledge, a way to separate themselves and portray themselves as something new. Any specialized industry does it. But, at the end of the day, accounting is nothing but basic arithmetic with a few specialized definitions.
The dangerous version of this in innovation is that most people spend more time on trying to make it unique and new than serving customers to make it better.
It’s almost like, if I make it better, people will buy more. But that’s not true. If I make it unique and different, people will buy it. That’s not true either. In a lot of cases, people weren’t going out to make something new and different — they were going after solving a specific struggling moment in people’s lives.
When they focused on the problem, it caused them to create new things, but from different perspectives.
Creating a new idea is supply-side thinking
Greg framed it well: the concept of me creating a new idea — is that what we’d call supply-side thinking? Yes. That’s exactly where it falls.
I think of ideas as free. Everybody has an idea. If you sit in a room and brainstorm, everybody can come up with 100 ideas about anything. But what are good ideas? What ideas resonate? What ideas turn into creating value or helping people? When you bounce those ideas against the wall of new and unique and different, that’s not necessarily going to get you there.
And Greg is right that calling ideas free is a flawed concept – it takes time, effort, and money to develop a real idea, especially inside a company. The brainstorm, the filter process, the synthesis – those are usually the most expensive ideas. Because they don’t go that far, or they’re great in the mind but in practice, don’t execute.
Jobs to Be Done wasn’t a new idea either
People treat Jobs to Be Done like it came from nowhere. It didn’t.
It was born from the struggle of not being able to understand what people were saying and what they meant – not with a need state study, not with usage and attitudes. Usage and attitudes tell you how people think and feel about things, and what they do.
But not why they do it. That gap said: how do I figure this out?
What came out of it was a merging — some engineering principles, some marketing principles, and human psychology. Taguchi’s notion of functions. Deming’s causal structure, and the understanding that everything is a system. That I need to think about the outcomes I’m trying to achieve, the progress I’m trying to help people make — and then build systems to go do that. It wasn’t something brand new. As Greg put it, it was born of other ideas, assembled around a specific struggling moment.
The pandemic didn’t create new Jobs; it created new struggling moments.
This is where the language really breaks down in innovation right now.
People say the pandemic created new Jobs to be Done. What Greg and I would say is: it may have created new struggling moments. It doesn’t necessarily create or define new jobs.
If I didn’t work from home before, that doesn’t mean the desire to work from home didn’t exist before – it means it didn’t exist for me. When the pandemic hit, my struggling moments changed, both from the supply side for corporations and from the demand side for the labor.
But those struggling moments existed independently of me.
And as Greg said directly: working from home is not a Job. It’s a channel. The job is still being productive. Still not being seen as someone who isn’t doing the right things; those Jobs didn’t change.
Greg’s example makes it concrete.
His son went from a classroom to a screen overnight in March 2020. What Greg hired the school to provide to his child did not change because of the pandemic. The way the school delivered it changed. But what he was asking for – educate him, help him graduate, help him get good standardised test scores, help him get to college; that didn’t change at all.
When churn happens in a crisis, it’s not because new Jobs appeared. It’s a new way of delivering against the same set of jobs.
Unpack the word before you pitch the idea
Are there times you’re talking to somebody and the word isn’t unpacked enough?
New idea is a perfect example. We all agreed on the superficial level but when we started digging, we found the holes.
The real goal is to unpack during the conversation so both people walk away with clear understanding — instead of just the feeling that we were clear. And when something doesn’t work, do the debrief. Find out what didn’t get unpacked.
There are no new ideas. There are struggling moments, derivatives, and better solutions built on everything that came before.