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• Module Note | August 2010 (Revised July 2020)

  Integrating Around the Job to Be Done

  Clayton Christensen, Rory McDonald, Laura E Day and Shaye Roseman

  Unlike traditional market segmentations that are based on a correlation of product sales or service with the attributes of the purchaser (such as age, gender, income level, and education level), jobs-based segmentation seeks to understand the causal roots of purchase—when a buyer needs to "hire" a product or service to get a "job" done. This note details the thought process and the methodology behind a jobs-based segmentation and provides numerous examples. It highlights three levels in the architecture of a job: 1) What is the fundamental job or problem the customer is facing? This includes political, functional, emotional, and social dimensions; 2) What are the experiences in purchase and use that, if all provided, would sum up to nailing the job perfectly? (The "hiring criteria"); and 3) What do we need to integrate, and how must we knit those things together, so that we can provide these experiences?

  Keywords: Integration planning; Jobs; Market segmentation; Customer Satisfaction; Marketing; Marketing Strategy; Problems and Challenges; Integration; Segmentation;

  Citation:

  Christensen, Clayton, Rory McDonald, Laura E Day, and Shaye Roseman. "Integrating Around the Job to Be Done." Harvard Business School Module Note 611-004, August 2010. (Revised July 2020.)  View Details

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• Module Note | June 2019 (Revised July 2020)

  Purpose Brands

  Rory McDonald, Clayton M. Christensen and Shaye Roseman

  Citation:

  McDonald, Rory, Clayton M. Christensen, and Shaye Roseman. "Purpose Brands." Harvard Business School Module Note 619-075, June 2019. (Revised July 2020.)  View Details

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• Article | Administrative Science Quarterly | June 2020

  Parallel Play: Startups, Nascent Markets, and the Effective Design of a Business Model

  Rory McDonald and Kathleen Eisenhardt

  Prior research advances several explanations for entrepreneurial success in nascent markets but leaves a key imperative unexplored: the business model. By studying five ventures in the same nascent market, we develop a novel theoretical framework for understanding how entrepreneurs effectively design business models: parallel play. Similar to parallel play by preschoolers, entrepreneurs engaged in parallel play interweave action, cognition, and timing to accelerate learning about a novel world. Specifically, they (1) borrow from peers and focus on established substitutes, (2) test assumptions, then commit to a broad business-model template, and (3) pause before elaborating the activity system. The insights from our framework contribute to research on optimal distinctiveness, and to the learning and evolutionary-adjustment literature on search. More broadly, we blend organization theory with a fresh theoretical lens—business-model processes—to highlight how organizations actually work and create value.

  Keywords: search; legitimacy; organizational innovation; organizational learning; mechanisms and processes; institutional entrepreneurship; qualitative methods; business model design; Business Model; Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Emerging Markets; Adaptation; Competition; Strategy;

  Citation:

  McDonald, Rory, and Kathleen Eisenhardt. "Parallel Play: Startups, Nascent Markets, and the Effective Design of a Business Model." Administrative Science Quarterly 65, no. 2 (June 2020): 483–523.  View Details

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