Innovation Solutions
“Innovation is a failure and risk-management game. If youre running a good innovation strategy and process, you have way more failures than successes. So what you want to do is fail early and fail fast and fail cheap”.
A typical innovation process comprises three main steps: Finding the opportunities, Prioritizing and choosing, and Optimizing”.
Finding the opportunities
Finding the opportunities involves ideation exercises, where selected company executives, and sometimes selected consumers, work together to create new product ideas.
These exercises require a focused direction and the right stimuli to be effective.
Our Brand Opportunity Study provides a great piece of knowledge to set the direction and to create stimuli.
Our Need Gap Analysis is also a pragmatic approach to further identify positioning opportunities in the market.
These studies provide the customer insight needed for the Ideation exercises to ask the right questions and produce innovative ideas with the right focus. This process generates a large quantity of ideas that can then be filtered down into the best, most practical or most innovative ones in order to inspire new and better design solutions and products.
Our Brand Opportunity Study provides a great piece of knowledge to set the direction and to create stimuli.
Our Idea Screening makes it possible to sort out a large number of ideas.
Prioritizing and Choosing
The ideas generated in the previous stage get into a funnel-like process where they are sorted and prioritized with the aid of the consumer. Most promising ideas are detected and moved forward to the third stage.
Our Idea Screening makes it possible to sort out a large number of ideas (even hundreds), bringing the consumer input early in the decision process, and ensuring the big ideas do not get lostin the twists and turns of the company processes and biases. The method combines multifunctional management and consumer input to rank the ideas by quantitative means, and involves qualitative insight to foster continuous learning.
Our Concept Screening helps you prioritize and refine the concepts in a very cost-effective way.We detect boosters and barriers in a qualitative phase, helping you avoid typical pitfalls in raw concepts.We measure the market potential for each concept via quantitative survey and benchmark-based analysis.A sequential monadic methodology ensures limited cost.
Optimizing
At this stage of the process a winning concept is clearly identified. However, our experience tells that launching it straight away severely limits its potential, risking failure.
Our Concept Test is specifically designed to assess the market potential of the concept, and to determine the improvement opportunities with actionable recommendations along the consumer adoption process:
- Does the product have the power for catching consumer attention.
- How effectively it communicates the idea.
- How effectively it attracts consumers.
- Performance at the point of purchase.
- Sustainability in the market.
The size of the business is determined by the concept: the way we tell the “story” to the consumer; whereas the product formulation ensures its sustainability in the market.
Refining the concept is key to achieving its full potential in the market.
Refining the product via Concept &Product Test is key to achieve sustainability.
We make normative analysis based on our proprietary benchmarks and databases.
We also provide volume estimates. Our proprietary mathematical model combinesdifferent marketing plans with the concept evaluation to assess the volume potential. Very useful to neutralize the financial risk associated to large innovations, by improving not only the concept but the advertising, distribution, and promotion plans as well.
Finding optimal product configuration.
Solution Design
At times, we face the decision to find the best combination of product or service elements generated in the creative process. For instance selecting the best ingredients, claims and pricing of a food product; or finding the best features and services for a technology product.
Our Solution Designer Study brings the customer voice into the decision, reducing the risk helping to optimize the product design by finding the attribute combination with the best consumer appeal.
Consumers are exposed to as series of hypothetical product configurations for them to choose. This realistic experiment produces high quality information, free from rationalizations and social desirability bias. A state of the art discrete choice model learns from the consumer choices and derives the utility of each product attribute. Different service configurations are simulated, determining the customer willingness-to-pay for them. The consumer preferences are predicted to find the optimal product configuration.
If you are facing a product/ service design decision, do not hesitate to contact us for a free assessment
