Jump Associates

Table of Contents

How do you do your work?
What kind of people do you work with?
What unique strengths do you bring to the table?
Where did the basic idea behind Jump come from?
How is this different from other firms?
What project size is optimal for you?
What does your deliverable typically look like?
What access do we have to you and the work during this process?

How do you do your work?

New opportunity development requires us to draw upon a variety of disciplines. We use social research techniques to reframe business problems in terms of what keeps ordinary folks in the world up at night. We use design methods to help companies connect with those people’s lives through compelling new products and services. And we use business planning techniques to create actionable roadmaps for sustaining success over time. Working hand in hand with some amazing clients, we’ve helped companies to dramatically increase their market share, deepen customer devotion and drive top-line revenue growth.

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What kind of people do you work with?

There’s an emerging breed of people in Corporate America who are chartered with the mission to go figure out what’s next. These very brave (or very crazy) individuals often have titles like VP of New Business, Director of Customer Insight or VP of Growth and Innovation. Sometimes they’re chartered with launching new ventures. Other times, they’re told to uncover insights about customers that no one knows about. We’d like to think that our clients share the mindset that things could be different.

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What unique strengths do you bring to the table?

We make the connections. Jump’s expertise is really in the seamless translation of market insights and business imperatives into actionable mandates for design. Our clients tell us that the research we do is better than anyone’s. It’s frankly unlikely that our methodologies are so different than anyone else’s. People like our findings because we work so hard to make them concrete and actionable. Our research only seems better because our follow up work is better at turning insights into actions.

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Where did the basic idea behind Jump come from?

The folks who started Jump came from consultancies, large corporations, and the not-for-profit sector. Inherent in our desire to have a real effect on the world was a belief that we could do things differently than what we saw around us. What we saw was this:

New product success was unpredictable because products were created in ignorance of the people who would use them.
Companies were spending a lot of effort on research that sat on shelves and never saw the light of day.
Strategic visions were never properly translated into offerings, while product insights never informed strategy.
Consultants charged for their time, not for the value of the changes they effected. Some were honest. Others were not.
Most product strategies were hopelessly incremental.

Jump was created to change this situation. We sought to help clients:

Link technological solutions with human needs.
Turn insights into actions.
Connect design with business strategy.
Tie consultant reward to customer success.
Bridge a company’s current condition to a better future state.

All this required clients to move beyond incrementalism. It required them to Jump.

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How is this different from other firms?

Unlike market research firms, we have actual experience in creating new products. Unlike design firms, we examine the wider context of business and human conditions. Unlike management consultants, we can pick up a pen and invent something new.

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What project size is optimal for you?

We offer the greatest value in projects that have room for questioning the basic project tenets and goals. Projects that give us some time get more than a superficial understanding of what people are doing is good, too. Timewise, we’ve worked on small projects that lasted six weeks, and projects that went for a year. We try to avoid having too many teams working in parallel on the same project, because we value the tacit knowledge that develops over multiple experiences. We don’t bill by time and materials. We bill by the value of the desired outcomes, and we guarantee results.

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What does your deliverable typically look like?

Deliverables need to be tailored to the recipients. Some clients prefer detailed written briefs with full-color spreads. One executive we work with always likes to create an “immersion space” - basically a room she can take people to. Our Japanese clients insist on Powerpoint. Some of the best deliverables are experiences, where developers have said “Get us the deliverable whenever you want, we already know by heart the things we need to move ahead.” We think that’s quite a departure from firms that emphasize pretty presentations, which are soon forgotten.

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What access do we have to you and the work during this process?

Real change only comes when those who will implement a plan own the ideas as co-creators. We don’t black box it. Ever. Clients see the rough sketches, the half-baked theories, and the grand mess that precedes Great Things. Hopefully, they’ve helped create it. We know we’re doing our job if somewhere in the middle of a project the client freaks out from information anxiety because we haven’t “protected them” from the process. That’s tough to manage, but we get through it.

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