Hundred percent virtual, but as interactive and real as it gets – this was the 2^nd JTBD Summit Europe 2021 hosted by Edizon’s JTBD Institute Europe in a nutshell. The second edition of Europe’s unique event series on customer-centricity exceeded the first summit not only in terms of the number of participants but also their diversity: With about 100 participants, 18 nationalities were represented, whose position titles ranged from A for “Associate Manager Digital” to V for “Vice President Product Management”.

In six topics from opportunity recognition over digitalization to new business development, speakers and participants approached the central question “How to Become Customer-Centric and Achieve Innovation Excellence”.

At the afternoon of Wednesday March 24, the pre-conference session kicked-off in two streams: a JTBD + ODI Introductory stream for newbies and the interactive Practitioner Circle discussing most burning challenges and strategic questions. The evening keynote was traditionally held by Anthony W. Ulwick, the mastermind behind the Outcome-Driven Innovation^® (ODI) process.

The second conference day was opened with a keynote from Martin Pattera from Edizon on putting customer-centricity into practice and the keynote from Robert Andexer from Mayer & Co Beschläge that demonstrated how JTBD guided radical innovation. After that, experienced ODI practitioners and experts of Edizon and Strategyn held special topic panels and breakout sessions. Here’s a selection of the companies behind the speakers, reflecting the broad range of industries that have successfully implemented JTBD & ODI: AIB, Nitto Belgium, Roche Diabetes Care, SMC Austria, Tetra Pak and UNIQA.

An interactive MIRO whiteboard, that depicted the whole event, enabled participants to contribute and ask specific questions. During the course of the event a lively discussion started here and the moderator team (charming Oliver Ratschka and Martin Pattera from Edizon) kept coming back to it repeatedly to discuss selected questions with the speakers.

What were the highlights? It is very difficult to pick out any from the abundance of great contributions. At this point we would just like to mention Roche Diabetes Care’s journey on how to put the patient in the center of the decision-making process described by Marco De Polo, Head Strategic Insights & Open Innovation in a ping-pong session with Dietfried Globocnik, Innovation Strategist at Edizon. We are also particularly pleased to have Lance A. Bettencourt, Associate Professor from Neeley School of Business and bestseller author, to give us a presentation on trends and technologies.

The JTBD Summit Europe concluded with a live job map interview to identify unmet needs of a practicing surgeon conducted by Tony Ulwick: A unique opportunity to experience the application ODI methodology in real life conditions and learn from the original!

Tony Ulwick and Oliver Ratschka summarized the conference on the main topic “How to become customer-centric and achieve innovation excellence”. Interested? Then see our matching white paper “JTBD Based Innovation Management System”.   

Finally, the JTBD Award Europe was ceremoniously presented to Mayer & Co Beschläge GmbH (MACO) (1st place), Roche Diabetes Care (2nd place) and Borealis AG (3rd place) that had made a special contribution to the further development of the method.

The participants were largely enthusiastic which is reflected by their résumés “Great event! Proud to be a part of it”, “Great storytelling & showing the value one should aim at creating & showing in the company”, “The live ODI interview was great to see the outcome statement collection in real time”. We take this “drive” and positive energy into the next year and are looking forward on the 3^rd JTBD Summit Europe at March 30-31, 2022 in Vienna. Mark the date in your calendar already!