New Thinking

As AI hubs rise, they risk repeating the costly failures of yesterday’s innovation labs: tech-first thinking, backlog chaos, and disconnect from the core business. The solution? A customer-focused approach rooted in Jobs-to-be-Done. By prioritizing real needs over shiny algorithms, AI hubs can escape the innovation graveyard—and become engines of lasting customer impact and measurable business value.

Putting Innovation on a Measurable Footing In uncertain times and challenging economic environments, a critical question arises: How much innovation is truly necessary? Innovation is not an end in itself—it must create real business value. To do that, it must deliver meaningful value to customers. The Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) approach makes customer needs measurable and helps transform innovation into a strategically focused and predictable lever for growth. Innovation Is Not a

When introducing a new product, launching a digital service, or running a sales campaign, a compelling value proposition is key to driving growth. Without it, efforts to grow often fall flat. But what happens when companies realize their value proposition isn’t connecting? Many turn to emotion—because emotions sell. But how exactly can you design for emotion? This article proposes a framework with a three-step approach to make value propositions more emotional and compelling.

Jobs-to-be-done is a powerful concept to make a growth project customer-focused and successful. For UX/CX, marketing&sales, product development and strategy. While the concept is easy to understand, its application can be quite tricky. Discover the Vendbridge Studio. Here we share our know-how from over 20 years as experts in the application and quantification of jobs-to-be-done. That’s why we propose the Vendbridge Studio. It contains self-learning courses on how to apply an

Many companies have initiated projects in artificial intelligence (AI). They are experimenting with the technology and are trying to find ways to integrate it into their products, services or internal processes. While non-AI initiatives are under pressure to justify expenses, AI related projects are easy to fund. “AI or die” seems to be the motto. But which of these initiatives will be game-changers and turn into profitable products and businesses? Which will significantly re

It is not enough to only talk about Jobs-to-be-done in a company - it has to become the coffee table talk! In this webinar we had StepStone as our guests talking about their experience of working with us on their past project with Jobs-to-be-done. Do you want to know how you can make the user and their needs the centre of your company? Then have a look at the video below. Get the slides here: Do you want to see the long version of the webinar?

Many companies are on a path to become more sustainable. Large efforts are undertaken to establish sustainability measuring and emissions reporting systems following the ESG regulation wave. More sustainable options or offset mechanisms are integrated in the offering. But around the corner, an even bigger challenge is lurking: Changing the customer habits to more sustainable behavior. There is a lot of evidence that customers do not follow. Every change in products or offerin

Many companies are on a path to become more sustainable. Large efforts are undertaken to establish sustainability measuring and emissions reporting systems following the ESG regulation wave. Sustainable products are developed or offset mechanisms are integrated in the offering. But around the corner, an even bigger challenge is lurking: Motivate customers to follow. There is a lot of evidence that customer adoption is low. This is not on the radar and will put many net-zero t

Amongst Jobs-to-be-done practitioners and our clients, Customer-Focused Innovation (CFI) is known as a process to measure unmet customer needs and to focus growth. CFI increases confidence to bet on the right ideas, focuses the discussions on facts and enhances data-driven decision making in innovation. Growth missions in all 3 growth horizons will more likely succeed. We like to share with you what we have learnt on our mission towards more actionability and impact, since

Many companies have set ambitious sustainability goals to reduce their carbon footprint in scopes 1-3 and achieve net zero by 2050. Many good initiatives have been launched to achieve this. Most of them are consumer or customer-facing such as more sustainable product alternatives, offsetting options at moment of purchase, etc. Now however, companies realize that customers do not behave as sustainably as desired. Examples from our recent projects in sustainability: leisure tra

Companies work on many growth initiatives such as new product development, innovation, UX projects, etc. It’s clear that the success of these initiatives depends on how well they meet the needs of the users and customers. Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) is the most powerful framework to take the true outside-in perspective. It helps to identify real customer needs independently of internal hypotheses, beliefs and biases. A key challenge to apply JTBD however is the right framing for

Only 10-15% of ideas make it to market launch. Only 3% create more than €50 million revenue. Why? Most companies do not have an end-to-end process from innovation search field, to meaningful idea, to a scalable business. Are you looking to build new businesses inside your company? Do it right to avoid failures. To fix the process, Frank Mattes and Vendbridge joined forces. Frank is best-selling author of Lean Scaleup, an end-to-end process for corporate business building. Ven

Building new businesses inside a large organization is tough. Only 10-15% of innovation ideas make it to market launch and only 3% create more than €50 million revenue. Why is this so? Companies hope that their past success recipes carry over to the future (spoiler alert: not true for most companies, as the statistics show). Their end-to-end process, from idea to scaled business, is broken. Vendbridge and Lean Scaleup fixed this broken process to beat the odds mentioned above

In the following interview, Beat Walther and Yann Wermuth discuss the Customer-Focused Innovation process and which benefits its entails.

Vendbridge contribution to the Learning Festival of the National University of Singapore Organizations are drowning in too many ideas and options. With the rise of digitalization and new technologies like AI options and ideas have exploded. Technological change is faster than ever, and new opportunities arise constantly. But which of these ideas and options truly add value to people’s lives? How to apply new technologies to unsolved customer problems? The Jobs-to-be-done logi

Are you drowning in a notion of ideas? Companies today have become great at producing innovation ideas. But today, the problem is too many ideas. There is so much that you can work on and start doing, so many new technologies, so many new possibilities and issues. But, how do you decide where to start? How do you prioritize all those many different ideas and options? We believe that for this you must take the customer perspective. Because in the end you want to work on tho

Too many projects on the innovation roadmap? Which features to implement? Which functionalities put into a digital solution? As companies typically have too many ideas it can become challenging for chief developers, design teams and CFOs to make these tradeoff decisions. Predicting innovation success is like looking at a crystal ball. There are ways to look through the crystal ball and predict which ideas will most likely win. It's called Customer Focused Innovation, or CFI.

We all agree, innovation is critical for growth. But only 6% of CEOs are satisfied with their innovation performance, found a recent McKinsey study. Why this mismatch? The root cause is: companies work on innovation ideas without having a fact based view, which idea will solve customer problems that are currently not solved. The pain points of today are the successful innovations of tomorrow. That's why we have developed Customer Focused Innovation, or CFI. With CFI we create

Customer Pain Points, the golden nuggets for successful innovation Customer Pain Points are the unsolved problems that customers have when using a product. They are the golden nuggets needed to create successfull innovations. It's that simple: Innovations that don't solve a relevant customer problem will fail! Those that do solve a problem will win. Hence, the challenge in innovation is to find the relevant customer Pain Points and match the innovative solution. How? Jobs-to

Yann Wermuth explains why you should chose the blue pill over the red pill: Companies don't know it, but they are trapped. Trapped in one way of thinking that in fact endangers all of their innovation ideas. It's one of the main reasons why innovation fails. There is a way out, but you have to make the choice. You can either take the red pill. If you take the red pill, innovation goes on as it always does. Everything will stay the same. The red pill is called "technology dr