But if you buy a new technology, you don’t know whether it is going to succeed, for example the Blu Ray. You didn’t know at that time which technology is going to dominate, which is going to be the industry standard, so people waited. You wait, and therefore it takes time for the product to succeed. Again, I’m talking on the industry level. Within the industry, some brands will grow faster than others. That’s fine, and then they might take a few years, less than 10 years to reach dominance in the market. But that’s not what we are talking about. It’s not about the brand’s market share. It’s out of the total market potential, how fast are you going to reach 50%? It’s not the market share of a specific brand, but the rate of growth of the market.

One of the things that we have managed to find out is the fact that innovation growth is slow. When somebody comes to you with a new product or a new innovation and that entrepreneur says it will capture 50% of the market in two years, that never happens. Usually when you think about very important innovations, say, CD players, MP3 players, if you think about the first market or one of the trials, either in North America, Europe or Southeast Asia, it takes [something] like 10 years to take 50% of the market.

So, those are the early adopters. They will adopt the early market in spite of the inherited risks of early innovation. The main market is not that forgiving. The main market wants the perfect product. So the early market might still be interested in how the product does in the technology itself. The main market is interested only in the functionality. If it functions well, they will buy it. If not, they will not.

What happened between 1870 and 1940, he argues, and I would agree, is what real transformation looks like. Any claims about current progress need to be compared with that baseline to see how they measure up.

Meanwhile, backbreaking toil both in the workplace and in the home was for the most part replaced by far less onerous employment. This is a point all too often missed by economists, who tend to think only about how much purchasing power people have, not about what they have to do to get it, and Gordon does an important service by reminding us that the conditions under which men and women labor are as important as the amount they get paid.Image

“Except in the rural South, daily life for every American changed beyond recognition between 1870 and 1940.” Electric lights replaced candles and whale oil, flush toilets replaced outhouses, cars and electric trains replaced horses. (In the 1880s, parts of New York’s financial district were seven feet deep in manure.)

In “The Rise and Fall of American Growth,” Gordon doubles down on that theme, declaring that the kind of rapid economic growth we still consider our due, and expect to continue forever, was in fact a one-time-only event. First came the Great Inventions, almost all dating from the late 19th century. Then came refinement and exploitation of those inventions — a process that took time, and exerted its peak effect on economic growth between 1920 and 1970. Everything since has at best been a faint echo of that great wave, and Gordon doesn’t expect us ever to see anything similar.

Robert J. Gordon, a distinguished macro­economist and economic historian at Northwestern, has been arguing for a long time against the techno-optimism that saturates our culture, with its constant assertion that we’re in the midst of revolutionary change. Starting at the height of the dot-com frenzy, he has repeatedly called for perspective: Developments in information and communication technology, he has insisted, just don’t measure up to past achievements. Specifically, he has argued that the I.T. revolution is less important than any one of the five Great Inventions that powered economic growth from 1870 to 1970: electricity, urban sanitation, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, the internal combustion engine and modern communication.

There are lots of ways to identify “Jobs To Be Done,” but among them we discuss a number of important questions to ask yourself in the book. Here are five of them: The first is to look in the mirror and ask yourself, “do you have a job that needs to be done?” If you identify a job, it’s likely that others will have that job, too. The second is, “where do you see non-consumption?”  You can learn as much from people who aren’t hiring any product as from those who are. Non-consumption is often where the most fertile opportunities lie. Another is, “what workarounds have people invented?” If you see consumers struggling to get something done by cobbling together workarounds, then pay attention to that. They’re probably deeply unhappy with the available solutions—and are a promising base of new business. The fourth is, “what tasks do people want to avoid?” There are plenty of jobs in daily life that we’d just as soon get out of. We call these “negative jobs.” Finally there is, “what surprising uses have customers invented for existing products?”

We define a “Job to Be Done” as the progress a customer seeks in particular circumstances. Both parts of that definition are important: A customer is looking to achieve something that she has been struggling with, and the circumstances in which she is trying to achieve that matter in how she’ll try to solve that struggle. A well-defined job, which should have not only functional, but emotional and social dimensions, offers a kind of innovation blueprint. This is very different from the traditional marketing concept of “needs” because it entails a much higher degree of specificity about what you’re solving for. Needs are ever present and that makes them necessarily more generic. “I need to eat” is a statement that is almost always true. “I need to feel healthy.” “I need to save for retirement.” Those needs are important to consumers, but their generality provides only the vaguest of direction to innovators as to how to satisfy them. Needs are analogous to trends—directionally useful, but totally insufficient for defining exactly what will cause a customer to choose one product or service over another. Jobs take into account a far more complex picture: The circumstances in which I need to eat can vary widely.