Innovation Unpacked | Mike Boysen

The medical imaging industry is stuck building massive, expensive "Cathedrals" for MRI machines because they believe better images only come from giant magnets. This old-fashioned thinking makes current scanners 42 times more expensive than necessary, costing millions for hardware when physics says it should cost about $50,000. By replacing expensive copper shielding and super-cold magnets with sm...

Warehouses incorrectly use people to place boxes on conveyor belts, believing only human hands can handle the variety of packages. This approach is incredibly wasteful because manual labor is slow and costs nearly 90 times more than using machines for the same amount of work. Instead of trying to make workers faster, companies should remove humans from this task entirely. The best solution is to u...

Executive Summary The Problem: The “standard” two-week pay cycle is a relic of 1950s mainframe computing, not a law of economics. This artificial latency forces workers into predatory debt (payday loans, overdrafts) and bleeds employers through massive turnover costs. The Efficiency Gap: We are paying $35 in overdraft fees or $4,000 in turnover costs to solve a problem that physics says costs $0.0...

“But Mike, we’re dealing with an abstract problem. It requires more nuance.” ~🤡 The Signal in the Noise: Why JTBD Needs First Principles Modern innovation is a graveyard of good intentions. It is populated by brilliant teams, well-funded startups, and legacy enterprises that all committed the same fatal error: they fell in love with a solution before they understood the problem. We’re told to “li...

Traditional banks are slow and expensive because they rely on outdated, manual systems and middlemen to verify transactions. This creates a massive efficiency gap where banks charge thousands of times more than the actual cost of moving data. The best solution is not to repair this broken system, but to switch to a decentralized model where you control your own assets and keep the profit yourself...

TL;DR: Modern dashboards create a major delay because they force humans to stare at data rather than fix problems. This process is incredibly wasteful, costing companies thousands of times more than simply letting a computer check the numbers itself. To solve this, businesses must stop building passive screens and start building "Decision Engines" that automatically fix issues the moment they happ...

New Masterclass: Principle to Priority Part I: The Deconstruction Introduction: The End of the “Yellow Pages” Era The global freelance economy is currently valued at approximately $1.5 trillion , yet it operates on a digital architecture that hasn’t fundamentally evolved since 1999. Whether it is Upwork, Fiverr, or Toptal, the core mechanism remains identical to the physical Yellow Pages: a direct...

TL;DR : Building a modern revenue engine on the traditional "Funnel" is like trying to toast bread by running a nuclear power plant ; it’s a massive, over-engineered expenditure of high-quality energy to solve a simple data integrity problem that should cost near zero We’re not here to fix your Salesforce dashboard. We’re here to perform an autopsy on the delusion that “managing relationships” via...

This one is personal for me because I spent several decades in the Systems Integrator world and worked with small companies all the way up tol the Fortune 50. This is one of the many components of change we’ll see as an agentic world forces us to accept a new paradigm of value. The question for SIs is whether they continue to offer to integrate systems , or whether their new mission will be to del...

The Deconstruction (The Skeuomorphic Trap) The Great Skeuomorphic Lie (Reasoning by Analogy) To understand why the current generation of cloud whiteboards—Miro, Mural, Lucidspark, and their myriad clones—are destined for the digital scrapheap, we must first use the Socratic Scalpel to excise the “Stuck Belief” that birthed them. The collective hallucination of the SaaS industry is this: “Digital c...

This is a long one for my paid subscribers. I didn’t want to break it into a series so you won’t be able to read it all in your email client. Sorry. Downloadable cheat sheet at the end. Part 1: The Trap of the “Solution” Chapter 1: The Most Expensive Words in Business: “What’s the Solution?” The demand arrived, as it so often does, with the force of a royal decree. It came from the new, high-energ...

Please Participate I’m doing some innovation research and could use your help. In exchange, I will gladly give you 🚨 FREE 🚨 access to my JTBD Masterclass and 6 other courses that come with it. It’ll take less than 10 minutes of your time. This is completely anonymous unless you opt-in for the Masterclass Click here to participate: https://web.jtbd.one/inno-survey Introduction: The Billion-Dollar...

Please Participate I’m doing some innovation research and could use your help. In exchange, I will gladly give you FREE access to my JTBD Masterclass and 6 other courses that come with it. It’ll take less than 10 minutes of your time. This is completely anonymous unless you opt-in for the Masterclass Click here to participate: https://web.jtbd.one/inno-survey Introduction: The Illusion of Innovati...

🚨🚨 Please Participate 🚨🚨 I’m doing some innovation research and could use your help. In exchange, I’m happy to offer you FREE access to my JTBD Masterclass and 6 other courses that come with it. It’ll take less than 10 minutes of your time. This is completely anonymous unless you opt-in for the Masterclass Click here to participate: https://web.jtbd.one/inno-survey Introduction: The End of an...

Introduction: The Passion and the Paradox You know the feeling. It’s that quiet moment at the end of a long day when the barn is finally still. The air smells of hay and horses, a scent that’s more comforting to you than any perfume. You’ve spent the last ten hours on your feet—teaching, riding, lunging, managing. You’ve celebrated a student’s first canter, diagnosed a subtle lameness, and mentall...

Table of Contents * Introduction: You Won the Customer. Now Win the Last Mile. * First-Principles Deconstruction: The Job of “Getting Food Delivered” * The Three Paths to Delivery Independence * Playbook 1: The ‘Ghost Fleet’ - Leveraging Delivery-as-a-Service (DaaS) * Playbook 2: The Delivery Co-op - Strength in Numbers * Playbook 3: The Unbundler - Building a Hybrid Logistics Engine * The Moat is...

Before I dive in , I wanted to share something about my JTBD Masterclass. It’s not just a comprehensive course (with prompts) for eliminating JTBD interviews. You gain access to a community full of additional courses and toolkits. And this is growing. Just wait until you see the next one (I mean 6)! Introduction: The Whiteboard Was a Masterpiece of Failure The post-mortem was a quiet affair. Six m...

Innovator’s Note: The startup graveyard is the greatest classroom for an innovator. While headlines celebrate the unicorns, the most valuable lessons are buried with the failures. In this series, I perform critical analyses and pre-/post-mortems. By dissecting why seemingly “can’t-miss” companies from top accelerators went - or could possibly go - under, we’ll uncover the patterns of collapse—from...

Introduction: The Ticking Time Bomb in Home Services Let's be honest. The experience of getting something fixed in your home is fundamentally broken. It’s a relic from a bygone era, built on a foundation of anxiety, uncertainty, and inefficiency. When your water heater dies or your AC gives out, you’re thrown into a reactive spiral of panic-Googling, vetting strangers based on a handful of questio...

Investors are rewarding companies for patching a broken system. Here’s a detailed blueprint for building a company that replaces it entirely. The $17 Million Misconception When a Y-Combinator alum like Gumloop announces a $17 million Series A, the startup world takes notice. The headlines write themselves: "No-code automation is heating up," "The API economy is booming," "Businesses are desperate...

Introduction: The Inevitable Collision Course Let's be honest. We're on a collision course. On one hand, you have the explosive, world-changing power of artificial intelligence, a technology advancing at a rate that's hard to comprehend. On the other, you have the hard physical limits of energy. For the last few years, the AI world has lived in a state of blissful ignorance, acting as if the laws...

Introduction: The Optimization Trap There's a siren song in the world of technology, and it whispers a single, seductive word: optimization . It’s the idea that the path to progress is paved by making the things we already do faster, cheaper, and more efficient. For decades, this has been the gospel of enterprise software, and few have preached it more successfully than Pegasystems. Pega has built...

Introduction: The Allure of the Obvious Problem You see a company like TectoAI and it just makes sense . We have a new, powerful, and slightly unpredictable technology—autonomous AI agents. These agents are being called "AI employees." And just like human employees, they need rules, oversight, and governance to make sure they don't cause chaos. It's a simple, linear, and logical connection. It’s t...

Many “innovation consultants” swear by Switch Interviews. I built my career by consciously avoiding them. Here’s the fundamental flaw I saw from the start and the more rigorous system I chose instead. The "Now What?" Problem I Sidestepped Early in my innovation career, Switch Interviews were gaining serious traction. Everyone seemed to be talking about them. Intrigued, I did what I always do with...

I just reduced the price of my JTBD Masterclass for the final time. Get the tools that free you from consultants and analysis paralysis Now, on with the show! The buzz around artificial intelligence is everywhere. It’s the topic on your phone, in the news, and in every corporate meeting. Companies are pouring massive resources into AI, believing it's the answer to all their innovation prayers and...