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Discover Unarticulated Needs With This Tool
How a jobs-to-be-done analysis and a four-quadrant marketplace map help founders find customer needs that customers have not yet put into words.
Patrick Ng, Venture Creation Instructor & Deep-Tech Mentor
Patrick Ng maps customer needs (articulated or unarticulated) against market solutions (served or unserved) to produce four quadrants: the existing market, established solutions, known gaps and the undiscovered. Each calls for a different strategy, from removing adoption barriers in known gaps to enhancing or stripping back value propositions in established solutions.
The undiscovered quadrant is where a jobs-to-be-done analysis earns its place. He describes work with an urban farm where 60 percent of respondents said they would pay up to three times more for produce that stays fresh without refrigeration, and with a lost-and-found app whose users wanted reassurance as much as their belongings back. The method rests on open-ended interviews, repeated "why" questions and observation to check that behaviour matches what people say.
Source
Catalogued by Spark Launchpad blog ›
More by Patrick Ng
- APAC Regionalisation with a "Legal-first" Approach
A founder's guide to protecting intellectual property before expanding across Asia-Pacific, built on proof of ownership, enforceable litigation rights and a Singapore hub-and-spoke structure.
- Can Trust Be Explained Simply? The Equation That Changed How I Pitch
How the trust equation from The Trusted Advisor changed the way Patrick Ng pitches, and why self-orientation is the variable that decides whether an audience believes you.
- The IP Paradox: Why Exclusivity is the Secret Weapon for Scaling Social Impact
An argument that intellectual property protects social enterprises rather than working against them, first presented at KPMG's Gen2050 session on IP for sustainability solutions.
- From Liability to Uptime: The Business Case for AI in Cybersecurity
A business case for AI-driven cyber defence written for executives rather than security teams, mapping AI's value to uptime, compliance and data trust.
- The Foundation of Innovation
Patrick Ng's account of moving from inventor to technology commercialisation, and why he concluded that ventures succeed on a deep understanding of the customer's problem rather than on the invention.
- In Innovation, Go Slow to Go Long
A marathon runner's case for treating innovation as a systematic, repeatable process built on preparation, user empathy and hypothesis testing rather than inspiration.
- Digital Transformation Transform People, Processes and Systems
Why digital transformation projects that stop at technology adoption rarely improve the business, and a five-step sequence that starts from the intended outcome.
- Brainstorming Approach: Uncover Great Ideas from Diverse Individuals, Inclusively and Respectfully
How a structured brainstorming session brought a divided startup-challenge team back to a single direction, and the facilitation choices that made it work.
- Venture Storytelling
How to build a startup pitch as a story using the design thinking cycle, from vision and purpose through the problem, the solution and the plan to scale, first delivered at the UOB FinLab GreenTech Accelerator 2022.
- Spark Canvas: Problems Worth Solving
Patrick Ng introduces the Spark Canvas, a customer-problem discovery tool he built after finding the Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas left too many startup teams with poor customer-problem fit.