Quantifies customer desired outcomes for a job and identifies underserved needs as innovation opportunities.
Which desired outcomes are important and insufficiently fulfilled for which customer segments, and where is the largest quantitative innovation lever?
Outcome-Driven Innovation clarifies customer problems, solution opportunities, and evidence. It separates jobs, desired outcomes, importance, satisfaction, and opportunity, and captures results as desired outcome statements, an opportunity landscape, and segments by underserved needs.
The team defines the job to be done, identifies stakeholders and beneficiaries, formulates desired outcomes for the job, measures importance and satisfaction for each outcome, calculates opportunity scores, and uses underserved outcomes as innovation levers.
Method sketch for a quick mental model.
The runsheet guides execution with 6 phases, timeboxes, 6 pitfalls, and clear stop criteria.
Open runsheetOutcome-Driven Innovation was developed by Anthony Ulwick as a quantitative Jobs to be Done approach. Customers describe the job they want to get done and the desired outcomes in measurable statements, often framed as minimizing time, reducing likelihood, or increasing probability. These outcomes are rated by importance and current satisfaction, creating an opportunity score. High-importance, low-satisfaction outcomes point to underserved innovation spaces.
Spend time crafting clean desired outcome statements, because vague statements distort later scoring. Keep outcomes separate from solutions and avoid feature lists at this stage.
Compact working template for Outcome-Driven Innovation with context, input, output artifacts, and next step.
Innovation method by Ulwick that captures customer wants as measurable desired outcomes.
When and for what do we use this method?
Which data, observations, decisions, or materials are available?
Short notes along the runsheet.
Owner, date, and success signal.
Short decision aid for existing alternatives.
Statt Outcome-Driven Innovation, wenn du mit Jobs to Be Done Bedürfnisse über zu erledigende Jobs statt über Zielgruppentypen verstehen willst.
Moves customer problem, solution idea, and evidence toward a concrete result through "collect outcomes from discovery", "define an importance scale", and "calculate and sort the score".
Clarifies customer problems, solution ideas, and evidence by framing an opportunity hypothesis, recruiting participants, and turning insights into opportunities.
Turns customer problems, solution ideas, and evidence into a tangible result by recruiting customers, asking for the switching story, and deriving opportunities.
Statt Outcome-Driven Innovation, wenn du mit Jobs to Be Done Bedürfnisse über zu erledigende Jobs statt über Zielgruppentypen verstehen willst.
Turns customer problems, solution ideas, and evidence into a tangible result by setting outcomes, collecting opportunities, and updating learning status.
Uses a recurring learning loop to connect direction, current condition, target condition, and the next smallest experiment.
Turns customer problems, solution ideas, and evidence into a tangible result through collecting assumptions, rating importance, and planning tests.