Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

by Clayton M. Christensen

We offer here five ways to uncover jobs that might be right in front of you if you know what you’re looking for: seeing jobs in your own life, finding opportunity in nonconsumption, identifying workarounds, zoning in on things we don’t want to do, and spotting unusual uses of products.

The healthiest mindset for innovation is that nearly all data—whether presented in the form of a large quantitative data set on one extreme, or an ethnographic description of behavior on the other—is built upon human bias and judgment.

All data is man-made. Somebody, at some point, decided what data to collect, how to organize it, how to present it, and how to infer meaning from it—and it embeds all kinds of false rigor into the process.