I am moving from Bombay to Gurgaon [ from the state of Maharashtra to the state of Haryana in North India ]. Just completed the website dedicated to the apartment in question.

Briefly, it is 1,080 sq. ft. in area with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, one kitchen, one living plus dining room and one balcony. For photographs of the apartment and the housing society, please visit the I-805 website.

For finding out the price, please get in touch!

By thoroughly mapping a job the customer is trying to get done, a company can discover opportunities for breakthrough products and opportunities.

ARTICLE AT A GLANCE

THE ANATOMY OF A CUSTOMER JOB

Every job, from transplanting a heart to cleaning a floor, has a distinct beginning, middle and end, and comprises a set of process steps along the way.

That universal structure, regardless of the customer, has the following process steps : defining what the job requires; identifying and locating needed inputs; preparing the components and the physical environment; confirming that everything is ready; executing the task; monitoring the results and the environment; making modifications; and concluding the job. Because problems can occur at many points in the process, nearly all jobs also require a problem resolution step.

Customers hire different products or services to get the same job done.

CREATING A JOB MAP

• Define

What aspects of getting the job done must the customer define upfront in order to proceed? This step includes determining objectives; planning the approach; assessing which resources are necessary or available to complete the job ; and selecting resources.

• Locate

What inputs or items must the customer locate to do the job? Inputs are both tangible a intangible.

• Prepare

Hoe must the customer prepare the inputs and environment to do the job? Nearly all customer jobs involve an element of setting up and organizing materials. Before cooking french fries, the fast-food operator must open bags, portion, and load fries into baskets; the nurse must set out and organize surgical tools before an operation must begin. At this stage companies should consider ways to make setup less difficult.

• Confirm

Once preparation is complete, what does the customer need to verify before proceeding with the job to ensure with its successful execution? Here, the customer makes sure that materials and the working environment have been properly prepared; validates the quality and functional capacity of material and informational components; and confirms priorities when deciding among execution options.

• Execute

What must customers do to execute a job successfully? Whether they are printing a document or administering anesthesia, customers consider the execution step the most important part of the job. Because execution is also the most visible step, customers are especially concerned about avoiding problems and delays, as well as achieving optimal results.

• Monitor

What does the customer need to monitor to ensure that the job is successfully executed? Customers must keep an eye on the results or output during execution, especially to determine whether they have to make adjustments to get the task back on track in the event of a problem.

• Modify

What might the customer need to alert for the job to be completed? When there are changes in the inputs or in the environment, or if the execution is problematic, the customer may need help with updates, adjustments or maintenance.

• Conclude

What must the customer do to finish the job? Customers often think of concluding steps as burdensome because the core job has already been completed, so companies need to help them simplify the process.

MAPPING A CUSTOMER JOB

To find ways to innovate, deconstruct the job a customer is trying to get done. By working through the questions here, you can map a customer job in just a handful of interviews with customers and internal experts.

Start by understanding the execution step, to establish context and a frame of reference. Next, examine each step before execution and then after, to uncover the role each plays in getting the job done.

To ensure that you are mapping steps [ what the customer is trying to accomplish ] rather than process solutions [ what is currently being done ] as yourself the validating questions below at each step.

Defining the Execution Step

What are the most central tasks that must be accomplished in getting the job done?
END : Validate the steps.

Defining Pre-Execution Steps

What must happen before the core-execution step to ensure the job is successfully carried out?

• What must be planned or defined before the execution step?
• What must be located or gathered?
• What must be prepared or setup?
• What must be confirmed before the execution step?

END : Validate the steps.

Defining Post Execution Steps

What must happen after the core execution step to ensure the job is successfully carried out?

• What must be monitored or verified after the execution step to ensure the job is successfully carried out?
• What must be modified or adjusted after the execution step?
• What must be done to properly conclude the job or to prepare for the next job cycle?

END : Validate the steps.

UNCOVERING OPPORTUNITIES FOR INNOVATION

With a job map in hand, you can begin to look systematically for opportunities to create value. The questions below can guide you in your search and help you avoid overlooking any possibilities. A great way to begin is to consider the biggest drawbacks of current solutions at each step in the map – in particular, drawbacks related to speed of execution, variability, and the quality of the output. To increase the effectiveness of this approach, invite a team of diverse experts – marketing, design, engineering, and even some lead customers – to participate in this discussion.

Opportunities at Job Level
• Can the job be executed in a more effective or efficient sequence?
• Do some customers struggle more with executing the job than others [ for instance, novices versus experts, older versus younger ]?
• What struggles or inconveniences do customers experience because they must rely on multiple solutions to get the job done?
• Is it possible to eliminate the need for particular inputs or outputs from the job?
• Is it necessary that the customers execute all the steps for which they are currently responsible?
• Can the burden be automated or shifted to someone else?
• How many trends affect the way the job is executed in the future?
• In what contexts do customers most struggle with executing the job today? Where else or when else might customer want to execute the job?

Opportunities at the Step Level
• What causes variability [ or unreliability ] in executing this step? What causes execution to go off-track?
• Do some customers struggle more than others with this step?
• What does this step’s ideal output look like [ and in what ways is the current output less than ideal ]?
• Is this step more difficult to execute successfully in some contexts than others?
• What are the biggest drawbacks of current solutions used to execute this step?
• What makes executing this step time-consuming or inconvenient?

To identify opportunities for innovation, some companies focus on product leadership, some on operational excellence, and some on customer intimacy. Some offer services ; others offer goods. Regardless of which business model a company chooses, the fundamental basis for identifying opportunities for growth is the same. When companies understand that customers hire products, services, software, and ideas to get jobs done, they can dissect those jobs to discover the innovative opportunities that are the key to growth.

by Lance E. Bettencourt who is a senior consultant with Strategyn, an innovation management consultancy based in Aspen, Colorado and Anthony W. Ulwick who is the CEO and founder of Strategyn. Anthony is the author of What Customers Want.

From the Dezeen website as they have referred from IDEO:

The Aquaduct is a pedal powered concept vehicle that transports, filters, and stores water for the developing world. The functional model was designed and constructed over a three week period for the Innovate or Die contest hosted by Google and Specialized.

The vehicle seeks to address the two main challenges with water in the developing world: sanitation and transportation. Water-related diseases kill thousands of people each day. Moreover, water sources can be miles away from the home, and women must walk these distances carrying heavy water vessels. The Aquaduct is designed to allow a person to sanitize and transport water simultaneously.

Read the complete article here.

Stop searching for God and just sit!

You know it strikes me as interesting that when businesses want to see more innovation, they talk about creativity. They hold workshops on how to be creative. But when you talk to most creative people — like artists, inventors, and yes, bloggers — they don’t talk about creativity, they talk about process.

Is it possible that the reason we creative types talk about processes is because once the processes are taken care of, we have more time to spend dreaming – hence more time to spend being creative?

Manufactured by Design for Development.

I personally can never imagine spending more time than it takes to cast a cursory glance to view a video on the video iPod. Especially not for interesting content – I might use it to view some lectures from Stanford [ where the audio is important than the video and the only reason I might view the video is because there might be a PowerPoint presentation in the background ].

I own a U2 edition, 20 GB, black and white audio iPod.

But contrast that with someone trying to quit an addiction [ for example ]. For them each day without the addictive substance is a small victory and a huge change as compared to their previously addiction-filled life. There is debate whether it is better to quit smoking in one go or to start reducing the intake one cigarette at a time. I personally believe that it is better to completely cut out the cigarette intake – the first week/month might be full of tough withdrawal symptoms but the problem is more likely to be cured. But what if I switch the addiction from smoking to drugs? Quitting drugs overnight is not only not recommended, specialized care is also needed for people addicted to various kinds of drugs.

Depending on the kind of innovation that an organization is going in for, they could either do it by themselves or they could hire someone to work with them. It could either be picking a thorn out of the organization’s foot or it could require a sophisticated heart and brain surgery. Either ways, it’s better to have help and professional help at that.

Since the subject of Innovation is extremely subjective and no two cases are the same, a great contribution to the growth of Innovation Practice would be documented case studies detailing the peculiarities of each case.

“I always describe working for Puma as, ‘They give you all the rope in the world to hang yourself with,’” chuckles Bertone (Brand Director of Puma). “Your job? Don’t hang yourself.”

Paula Scher : When you’re feeling stale, she says, the best thing you can do to shake things up is to “look at what you’ve been doing for the past five years–and stop. The thing that’s most to be feared is doing the same thing over and over again.”

Most organizations, she says, rely on a process of checks and balances to ensure that the design adheres to some particular corporate strategy–that’s the language MBAs understand. Trouble is, graphic design is inherently subjective. Who can say that one font is quantifiably better than another, or that one shade of Pantone green will lead inevitably to the destruction of your brand? Without a passionate advocate, a strong initial design may be nibbled away by bureaucrats, each eager to prove his worth with a tweak here and a nip there. Scher’s ability to persuade, she realized, rested on two things: “I would have to be perceived, first, as an absolute authority, and second, as the most powerful person to approach about design.

The above from the latest version of FastCompany articles (1) on Puma, (2) on Paula Scher and (3) on Ziba Design.

The article starts with:

More than half of the money spent on innovation is wasted. At least, that’s the claim author and management consultant Geoffrey Moore makes in his book, Dealing With Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution.

The next paragraph puts the article more in perspective:

If the corporate world has a Holy Grail, it’s innovation. Unfortunately, much of the current effort and expense isn’t fully focused, says Moore. Instead of concentrating on a few bold ideas that could revolutionize their companies, most firms put their resources in too many places, often creating product enhancements that don’t actually enhance the bottom line.

So they’re talking about specifically product innovation in companies? But innovation doesn’t mean only getting ideas about products to the surface, it also means investing in resources that allow employees and the company to grow because of ideas related to the growth of the company – whether that’s related to product development or not is a different issue. I would say that money spent to just bring awareness about innovation would be money extremely well spent.

The article also goes into talk briefly about “outsourcing innovation”, which seems like a much debated topic currently.

There’s an e-book on the subject innovation available for download from InnovationLabs. The book will be available as a hard cover later in the year, but is available for download as a PDF right now. This is the website for the book and this is the download page.

Authored by partner Langdon Morris, this new book promises to teach executives how to develop an organizational culture that enables firms to produce innovation consistently over time.