Innovation Is Rarely New
A milkshake stays a milkshake in the same industry
I recently found myself revisiting Jobs to Be Done from an unusual angle, somewhere between the shower and a growing irritation. Not to refine a framework or compare interview techniques, but to understand why so much “innovation” still feels familiar.
Looking across the different JTBD streams—outcome-driven, switch-based, service-oriented, strategic—a pattern became hard to ignore. Many of these approaches produce better products, clearer priorities, and sharper decisions. Very few produce anything that could honestly be called new.
That realization kept pulling me back to the most famous JTBD example of all: the Milkshake case popularized by Clayton Christensen. It deserves its status. It clarified a job, reframed a situation, and corrected flawed assumptions.
And yet, stripped of mythology, it is anything but radical.
No new category.
No new technology.
No new business model.
Just a better alignment between an existing product and a specific moment in people’s lives.
That led to an uncomfortable conclusion. If even the canonical JTBD case is incremental, what does that say about innovation itself?
Viewed through this lens, the pattern becomes clear. Most innovations are not inventions. They are reconfigurations—substitutions and recombinations of existing products, services, and business models.
Often valuable. Often well executed.
But rarely new in the way innovation rhetoric suggests.
And perhaps the problem is not innovation.
Perhaps it is our misunderstanding of what innovation actually does.
The Category Illusion
We talk about innovation as if novelty were the point. New features. New markets. New categories. New technologies. Entire industries are built around the promise of “what’s next.”
People, however, do not experience life in categories.
They experience it in situations.
They sit in traffic. They postpone difficult decisions. They tolerate inefficiencies. They avoid embarrassment. They manage risk, visibility, and trade-offs.
Categories are retrospective abstractions. Jobs are the continuity beneath them.
Jobs change remarkably slowly. What changes is the surrounding context: cost, risk, legitimacy, timing, and exposure. In other words, what becomes acceptable.
This is where category thinking quietly distorts innovation efforts. When teams ask “What’s new?”, they are already looking in the wrong place.
A more revealing question is:
What was previously unacceptable, and why?
The secret of business model transformation? Renew around a stable job to be done, not inside a product category that is already collapsing.
The Strongest Competitor Is Doing Nothing
In almost every serious JTBD analysis, the same insight eventually emerges. The strongest competitor is rarely another product.
It is doing nothing.
Waiting. Tolerating. Improvising. Working around the problem. Accepting friction as normal. Accepting loss as the price of stability.
This is not inertia. It is rational behavior under uncertainty.
Many innovations fail not because they are inferior to existing solutions, but because they misunderstand what they are competing against. They design for feature superiority while ignoring the real alternative: avoidance.
Innovation rarely wins by being better.
It wins by making inaction less acceptable.
The real battleground is not against competitors, but against a status quo people have learned to live with.
What Feels Radical Is Often a Category Shift
When innovation feels disruptive, it is usually because a familiar job is suddenly handled by an unfamiliar category.
The job remains stable.
The means change.
Ownership becomes access.
Planning becomes immediacy.
Effort becomes automation.
The disruption comes not from novelty, but from reallocation. Value moves. Risk moves. Control moves.
This is why so many “breakthroughs” appear obvious in hindsight. The job wfas always there. What changed was the feasibility of serving it differently.
What feels radical is often not the job itself, but the collapse of an old category boundary.
Incremental Innovation Is Not a Failure
The Milkshake case illustrates this clearly. It was incremental. And it was appropriate.
No existing power structure was challenged.
No revenue logic was threatened.
No identity was destabilized.
The innovation worked precisely because it did not demand sacrifice.
Incremental innovation is often the only form that is politically, organizationally, and economically viable. It preserves incentives, protects roles, and avoids visible losers.
The problem is not incremental innovation.
The problem is mistaking it for change (transformation).
Organizations frequently believe they are innovating boldly when they are, in reality, optimizing safely.
The Threshold of Acceptability
If innovation is not primarily about creating new jobs, what is it really about?
It is about shifting the threshold of acceptability.
Revisiting the milkshake case with its original context in mind matters. This work was done in the early 2000s—before smartphones, mobile ordering, or digital subscriptions. The morning commuter was not lacking convenient alternatives. A banana or a prefabricated chocolate bar was already available at home, required no extra stop, and demanded less effort than pulling into a drive-through.
And yet, people still stopped at McDonald’s.
Convenience alone cannot explain that choice. Stopping the car, waiting in line, and ordering is objectively more effortful than grabbing something already at home. The decision only becomes coherent once acceptability is considered in situational terms rather than in abstract measures of speed or effort.
The banana and the chocolate bar failed not because they were inconvenient, but because they failed to fit the full duration and constraints of the commute. They ended too quickly, demanded attention at the wrong moment, or introduced small but real risks—mess, distraction, interruption. They solved hunger, but not the experience of a long, dull drive.
The milkshake lowered the threshold of acceptability within that situation. It lasted long enough. It could be consumed with one hand. It required no decisions mid-drive. It reduced cognitive and physical friction. The job itself was not new. Making the commute tolerable had always existed. What changed was what became acceptable while driving.
What is striking, however, is where this innovation stopped.
The response focused on the product—its thickness, packaging, and pacing—while leaving the surrounding circumstances untouched. The when remained the early morning rush. The where remained the car. The how remained a drive-through purchase followed by consumption in traffic. Even in the early 2000s, McDonald’s could have experimented with flow, ritual, or decision elimination around the commute. Instead, innovation stayed safely inside the product and its category.
That boundary explains why the outcome was incremental rather than transformative. The milkshake absorbed competition from adjacent categories like bananas and chocolate bars, but it did so by optimizing within a fixed situation. The job was served better, but the conditions under which it existed were left intact.
Innovation shifts what people are willing to tolerate.
It changes the balance between effort and outcome, risk and reward, exposure and protection.
It does not create new wants.
It lowers the threshold of what becomes acceptable.
An alternative past?: From a 2000 perspective, a truly category-challenging innovation by McDonald’s would have required imagining a future in which food no longer carried the burden of making the commute tolerable. If the technologies that later emerged had been available or even clearly foreseeable, McDonald’s could have redefined its role from selling breakfast to orchestrating the commute itself. Instead of designing a milkshake to last thirty minutes, the company could have designed the thirty minutes: eliminating the need to stop through predictive ordering, removing decision friction entirely, embedding itself into cars and routines, and shifting from calories to attention, pacing, and experience. In that imagined future, boredom would be managed through content, structure, and automation rather than consumption. The milkshake would not be improved, it would be made unnecessary. From the vantage point of 2000, that would have sounded like science fiction. Not because it violated the job logic, but because it violated the category boundary. It required accepting that the real innovation was not a better product for the car, but a future in which the car no longer needed a product at all.
Why Value Propositions Explain So Little
This is also why value propositions are weak predictors of adoption. They focus on benefits while ignoring fear.
People rarely switch because something is better.
They switch when staying becomes worse.
Loss aversion is not a psychological quirk. It is a structural force. It explains why technically superior solutions struggle while inferior but familiar ones persist.
When innovation succeeds, it is often because it neutralizes loss: loss of time, loss of face, loss of control, loss of legitimacy, loss of identity.
Many innovation efforts fail quietly because they argue upside in a context defined by downside.
When Innovation Stops Being Incremental
Innovation becomes non-incremental when it forces a confrontation with loss.
Not customer loss, but internal loss.
It threatens existing competencies.
It devalues experience.
It breaks financial logic.
It challenges identity.
It demands exclusion.
At that point, the question is no longer “Is this a good idea?”
It becomes “Who absorbs the cost of change?”
Most innovation programs are designed to avoid that question, not answer it.
That is why truly transformative innovation is rare. Not because it is technically difficult, but because it is politically expensive.
The Myth of the Unserved Job
This brings us back to the original intuition. Are there truly unserved jobs?
Very few.
Most so-called “unserved” jobs are simply jobs that long remained below the threshold of acceptability (underserved). Not because they lacked value, but because acting on them demanded too much. They were too risky, too costly, too slow, too visible, or too socially and institutionally illegitimate.
What changes over time is not the job itself, but the conditions around it. New technologies reduce effort and risk. New regulations legitimize previously unacceptable behavior. New social norms and habits lower psychological and reputational costs. Together, they shift how people perceive what is acceptable to do.
What appears as a new job is often an old one that has crossed a feasibility threshold. Something that was once unreasonable, awkward, or irresponsible suddenly becomes normal, even expected.
This does not diminish innovation.
It grounds it.
Why This Perspective Matters
Believing that innovation is about new jobs encourages exploration without accountability. It rewards novelty over relevance and ideation over decision.
Understanding innovation as a shift in acceptability changes the conversation. It brings trade-offs to the surface. It exposes constraints. It makes loss visible.
It also restores humility. We are not inventing human motivation. We are negotiating with it.
A Better Question
Instead of asking what is new as a innovation-creator or innovation-buyer, a more productive question emerges:
What are we still tolerating today, not because it works, but because every alternative has been too costly to accept?
That question redirects attention from imagination to reality, from brainstorming to diagnosis, from aspiration to courage.
Innovation does not begin with ideas.
It begins when inaction drops below the threshold of acceptability.
And that is usually enough to change everything.
