Why Innovation fails and how to fix it

Customers Don’t Know What They Want” and Other Myths Killing Your Innovation

Thursday, March 26, 2026 – 1:30 PM ET

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Discussion Points

Debunking Innovation’s Most Dangerous Myths – Why “customers don’t know what they want” and “if I asked them, they’d say faster horses” are excuses that sabotage your innovation process and keep teams guessing instead of knowing
“Why 95% of Product Teams Can’t Agree on What a Customer Need Is” The fundamental flaw undermining innovation at most organizations—and the precise definition that eliminates ambiguity, aligns teams, and makes needs discoverable, measurable, and actionable across sales, marketing, development, and R&D.
Why Traditional Need-Gathering Methods Fail – Focus groups, customer interviews, and voice-of-the-customer programs capture the wrong inputs, leading to solutions that address what customers say rather than what they’re actually trying to accomplish
The Innovation Process That Ends the Debate – Learn the desired outcomes structure that transforms vague “customer needs” into specific, measurable, actionable statements that 100% of your organization can agree on and execute against
From Customer Inputs to Innovation Confidence – Discover how capturing 50-150 precise desired outcomes for any job enables you to know—with certainty—which needs are unmet and which solutions will win before you invest in development

Duration:

Minutes

Description

Why do 83% of innovation projects fail?

It’s not because customers don’t know what they want. It’s because organizations can’t agree on what a customer need even is. The most important input into the process.

When your sales team talks about features, marketing discusses delighters, development references specifications, and R&D focuses on technical capabilities—everyone claims they’re addressing customer needs, but they’re speaking completely different languages. This fundamental misalignment forces innovation to become expensive trial and error, with predictably devastating results.

But a small percentage of organizations have cracked the code. They’ve achieved an 86% innovation success rate—five times the industry average—by transforming innovation from creative guesswork into systematic science.

In this session, Tony Ulwick, pioneer of Jobs-to-be-Done Theory and Outcome-Driven Innovation, reveals the systematic process behind this dramatic performance gap. Drawing from 30 years applying ODI with Fortune 500 companies like Cordis Corporation, Bosch, Microsoft, and Arm & Hammer, Tony will show you:

Why innovation fails at most organizations—and the specific dysfunction that creates 83% failure rates
The precise framework for defining customer needs that eliminates silos and subjective interpretation
The Jobs-to-be-Done lens that shifts focus from products to customer jobs and makes needs quantifiable
The six-step ODI process that allows you to conceptualize winning products before development begins
Real evidence from companies that turned around struggling businesses and launched billion-dollar products using this approach

This isn’t theory. It’s a proven process with a documented track record validated by independent Harvard Business School research.

If you’re tired of innovation feeling like guesswork—or need to defend innovation investments with predictable ROI rather than hopeful projections—this session will fundamentally change how you approach product development.

Innovation doesn’t have to be art. It can be science.

Tony Ulwick

Tony is the pioneer of Jobs-to-be-Done Theory, inventor of the Outcome-Driven Innovation® (ODI) process, and founder and CEO of Strategyn.