Getting the Whole Job Done in the Mobility Sector

I’d like to share with you two examples of successful innovations in the mobility sector. The first example: In June 2009, the first taxi e-hailing app mytaxi was launched in the UK with great success (since 2014 mytaxi has been part of the Daimler Group). The app enables you to easily, quickly and reliably order and pay a taxi driver according to individual requirements, helping customers to get the job “hire a taxi ride” done better than the established radio call centers can. The second example: Reacting to mobility requirements of today’s growing cities, car sharing providers like Car2Go (subsidiary of Daimler Group) and DriveNow (subsidiary of BMW Group) have reinvented the sharing idea with their “free floating concept”: Customers can pick up and return shared cars in any given parking space within a defined area (instead of fixed stations), and they can use an app to locate free cars, unlock them, and pay for the ride.

Question: Did mytaxi innovate the taxi market? Did Car2Go and DriveNow innovate the car sharing market? Of course, this is a trick question: There is no such thing as a taxi market or a car sharing market. Markets should not be defined around products or services, since they are subject to an economic life cycle: they are “born”, they grow up and it is certain than one day they will be replaced by the next product generation or completely new solution platform. In Jobs-to-be-Done thinking, we define a market as a group of people that want to get a certain job done. For example, music enthusiasts that want to listen to music constitute a market, tradesmen that want to cut a piece of wood in a straight line constitute a market, and cyber security managers that want to protect a web site from cyber threats constitute a market. The advantage of this thinking is that the base unit for market definition is stable in the long-term: while products come and go, the purpose behind these solutions – the job customers want to get done – stays unchanged. Defining a market around the Job-to-be-Done enables companies to look at it independent of today’s solutions from a higher level perspective, broadening the innovation horizon for future solutions.

BMW Group and Daimler AG understood this perfectly well when they created a joint venture (in fact five joint ventures) with the aim of integrating the services of the taxi e-hailing app with car sharing, mobile trip-planning, parking, and electric charging services. Independent of solutions such as taxis, cars, public transport, and bikes, the joint venture aims to get the whole job done at a higher level perspective: helping people in urban areas to get where they want to go. We will be following this development with interest, as in our opinion this might be one of the most promising developments in the mobility sector.