Orange Squid is a strategic innovation consultancy that partners with organisations to help build innovation capability and deliver strategic innovations to the market. It is a small team of innovation experts that is passionate about turning the best academic thinking into pragmatic, actionable approaches that organisations can adopt and implement. Its vision is to “help organisations innovate and re-establish Australia as a global leader of change”. Orange Squid was established in 2015 and is based in Melbourne.

A key figure of inspiration for Orange Squid is Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Professor who is widely regarded as the ‘godfather’ of modern innovation theory having written a number of successful publications including “The Innovator’s Solution” and “The Innovator’s Dilemma”. He coined the term Disruptive Innovation and his theories on market disruption have been adopted globally with “disruption” now being a common term in the business vernacular.

Christensen is a big believer in customer-driven innovation and he took Theodore Levitt’s early work and turned it into a new approach to understanding customers. He called this approach Jobs-To-Be-Done. His theory which is outlined in the 2005 Harvard Business Review article “Marketing Malpractice: The Cause and the Cure” presents the case for using the Jobs-To-Be-Done approach as an alternative to traditional research methods which have largely been ineffective at generating insights into customer needs. At its most simplistic level, Jobs-To-Be-Done methodology is based on the idea that customers “hire” products and services to get functional, emotional or social jobs done. Once you have uncovered the jobs they’re trying to get done, then designing a product to get the job done is fairly straightforward.

The Jobs-To-Be-Done Research product was one of Orange Squid’s foundation products that was launched in 2015 and has been refined over the last 18 months. The product helps Orange Squid’s clients identify “gaps” where customers are struggling to get jobs done because they’re being poorly served by the available market solutions. These gaps present the biggest opportunities for innovation – they are known customer problems where customers would value a better solution.

Orange Squid has continually refined and developed their methodology and capability and learnt how to make the research and insights process more efficient. They have deployed this product across a range of different industries/territories and have never failed to uncover new opportunities to innovate and create value. These territories include such diverse sectors as education, health, financial services, property and charities.

For further information about Orange Squid go to orangesquid.com.au