Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

by Clayton M. Christensen

A key goal in building a theory inductively is to develop one or more “constructs.” Constructs are rarely directly observable. Rather, a construct is an abstraction—quite often, a visualization that helps observers see how the phenomena interact with and change each other, over time. Whereas correlations reveal static relationships among the phenomena, a construct is a stepping-stone that helps us to see the dynamics of causality. In chemistry, for example, Auguste Laurent’s (1807–1853) visualizations (constructs) of chemical compounds enabled him to explain how compounds arise and are transformed into other compounds. In economics, Adam Smith’s construct (1776) of an “invisible hand” helped explain how free markets work. Figuratively, the invisible hand allocates capital and labor to activities that bring prosperity, and it takes resources away from entities that waste them. It has helped billions of people understand how capitalism, properly structured, helps mankind. In the theory of disruption, the key to defining the essence of disruption was being able to visualize trajectories of how technological progress and market needs interact. Why this diversion into the role of constructs in theories? The term “job” is a construct. It fits exactly the definition of what a construct is, and the role it plays in the Jobs to Be Done Theory. Understanding jobs as a construct involved carefully defining the terms that I needed to communicate what I had been seeing. The terms “hire...