https://myles-innovation.com/tags/clayton-christensen/Recent content in Clayton Christensen on MYLES — Strategy & Innovation ConsultingHugoenSun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100https://myles-innovation.com/blog/jtbd-history-christensen-ulwick/Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100https://myles-innovation.com/blog/jtbd-history-christensen-ulwick/<h2 id="two-men-one-idea-a-30-year-argument">Two Men, One Idea, a 30-Year Argument</h2> <p>The history of Jobs to Be Done is not a clean origin story. It is a messy, contested, productive intellectual dispute between two of the most influential thinkers in innovation, each of whom claims a different version of where the idea came from and what it actually means.</p> <p>Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor who coined the phrase, saw JTBD primarily as a narrative lens — a way of telling stories about customer motivation that made product decisions feel more human. Tony Ulwick, the practitioner who worked alongside Christensen at the beginning, saw something entirely different: a quantitative framework for eliminating product failure by measuring unmet needs with statistical precision.</p>