Developing an innovation strategy

Helping you define novel opportunities that embody true insight, are aligned with your business strategy, and have a clear path to money

We do this in close collaboration with you – often through rounds of intense working sessions followed by ‘crank’ time which enables us to synthesize, create new ideas, expand existing ones, and move the answer forward. Our core expertise is in consumer-facing businesses, however we work across many B2B industries ranging from basic materials to industrial goods.

The most common deliverables from this work include:

• Big, actionable growth opportunities framed in a way that is novel and exciting

• A clear set of innovation priorities that meet your growth objectives

Creating customer, consumer, and market insights

Helping you generate raw insight, translated into growth opportunities

Qualitative research is our focus, however we use existing quant research where appropriate to inform our work, and recommend further quant research when required to validate and size the insights surfaced through our qualitative work. We've followed couples on vacation to Mexico to uncover latent travel-related needs, followed service workers to understand their pain points on the job, shopped with consumers in-store and online to understand their decision journey, invaded closets and pantries to get to the bottom of how people really think and make decisions, and convened groups of men to understand what really matters when purchasing and using tools.

Most of our work centers around answering 3 types of questions:

• What big problems (latent and overt) could we solve through innovation?

• Who has these needs? Which needs are most valuable to solve? What specifically do buyers and consumers value? What implications does this have for product/service design, feature choice, pricing, and segmentation?

• How do people evaluate options, behave, and make decisions?

Developing & strengthening concepts

Helping you create killer ideas and turn them into tangible business opportunities 

Creating new business concepts is a creative collision involving many people. Human-centered design is our foundation, from ideation through prototyping and concept iteration. We also infuse a strong perspective of business, technology, and operational insights in order to develop concepts that are commercially viable and positioned to make money. 

There are many roles we typically play in this process, working in collaboration with you and others: 

• Designing dynamic ideation sessions to accelerate brainstorming and surface breakthrough ideas (see facilitation section) 

• Expanding and transforming your existing ideas into bigger opportunities 

• Making concepts stronger and more viable through rapid prototyping and user testing 

• Bringing concepts to life with a clear customer/consumer story, a strong commercial story, and a solid business case

Pressure-testing concepts and business cases

Identifying sources of risk and increasing chances of commercial success 
Most concepts have implicit flaws that aren’t discovered until significant investment has been sunk. We help prototype all elements of the new business early, modeling what needs to be true for the concept to succeed. 

This includes things like customer and consumer behavior, pricing, technological and supply chain feasibility, distribution, competitive reaction, and regulatory factors. By modeling every detail of what is required to make money, we can uncover implicit risks and create a plan to overcome them. This increases probability of success and reduces the cost of commercialization. 

Typical outputs from this work include: 

• A detailed model of what ‘success’ looks like 

• A comprehensive list of assumptions and risks to achieving success 

• A tactical plan to test these risks and overcome them