🔲 The only four problems that innovators can solve (revisited)

I was already presenting the four main problem categories innovative companies can solve in any market back in... 2016. Since then, I have made significant changes to the way I present this, and although I made a quick update in 2020, I never presented the complete framework here.

So, let's catch up.

The main point is that the strategic nature of the problem you want to solve for a given set of customers defines your market. And there are four main types of problems, depending on their criticality (people are dying from them in B2C or companies are going bankrupt in B2B) and visibility to customers (is it explicit or hidden to them?):

This convenient 2x2 matrix is not science, but it translates your customer knowledge and your market's vision. In that regard, big consulting firms or competitors may very much disagree with you.

That's OK.

Good vision and no customer knowledge do not work – the opposite doesn’t work either. The way you end up defining the problem will lead your market strategy and business model in a specific direction. 

If we go briefly through the four different types of problems, you will have: