Innovation
We help FMCG innovation leaders turn broad growth ambitions into clear, commercially relevant opportunity spaces that give teams a better starting point for innovation.
Our Opportunity Blueprints bring together the strategic why, where and what before teams jump into the how - creating tighter briefs, clearer choices and a stronger foundation for better ideas.
Innovation teams are rarely short of creativity. The problem is often what they are being creative against.
Too many innovation projects jump quickly into the what: concepts, products, propositions and solutions.
If the why and the where are still vague, teams can generate a lot of interesting ideas without being clear which problem they are solving, why it matters to the business or what a genuinely good answer needs to deliver.
That is why we take a clear two-phase approach
"95% of new products ultimately fail in market."
MIT Professional Education1
Phase 1
Clarify the Brief
Before teams start creating concepts, we get clear on:
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Phase 2
Create the Concepts
Once the brief is clear, teams can get into the how with much more focus and a better chance of generating ideas that are both creative and strategically useful.
The innovation strategy is too broad
Strategies such as "win in wellness", "premiumise the portfolio" or "find the next big thing" might point in a direction but they rarely give an innovation team enough to make good choices.
A useful innovation strategy needs to help teams distinguish between the things that fit and the things that do not. If everything qualifies, it isn't really a strategy.
Teams jump too quickly to solutions
The pressure to show progress can pull teams towards ideation before the opportunity is properly understood. That creates a predictable problem: lots of activity, lots of concepts, but no real way to judge which ideas are good.
A tighter opportunity gives creativity something useful to push against.
Big opportunity spaces produce small ideas
A business identifies an important consumer tension or a significant future growth space - then turns it into a handful of relatively incremental product ideas.
The opportunity may be big but the response isn't. The challenge is translating the size and ambition of the opportunity into a brief that encourages ideas capable of matching it.
Opportunity choices aren't connected to the business
An opportunity may be attractive in the market and still be wrong for you.
Opportunity identification isn't just about finding attractive spaces. It is about finding the attractive spaces your business has a right to pursue.
One of the biggest changes we think innovation teams need to make is becoming more comfortable with saying no
There will always be more things a business could pursue than it has the time, money or people to develop properly
That means innovation leaders need to think more like investors:
Opportunity Blueprints help make those choices explicit before significant resource gets committed
A clear reason to exist
You can explain why the business should care about it and what role innovation is expected to play.
Grounded in a real need
There is something meaningful happening with consumers, customers or the market rather than simply an interesting trend.
Commercially worth pursuing
The potential prize is significant enough to justify the time, resource and attention required.
The brand has a credible role
There is a reason why your organisation can create value in the space rather than simply observing that the opportunity exists.
Creates useful boundaries
Teams understand what is in and out, which helps them generate stronger ideas rather than more ideas.
Big enough to inspire
The opportunity is capable of producing ideas proportionate to the ambition behind it.
Global Beer Brand
Finding bigger long-term opportunities for growth
The client had enjoyed strong recent innovation success, but the question was how to look further ahead and identify bigger opportunities capable of opening up the brand over the longer term. We built from existing brand, consumer and innovation work rather than starting again. Together with the team, we explored breakthrough opportunities beyond the immediate product pipeline and shaped a clearer set of platforms and opportunity areas around which future innovation could be built.
A stronger long-term innovation direction and a clearer story the organisation could align behind.
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We connect strategy and innovation
We don't treat opportunity identification as a trends exercise or an ideation warm-up. It needs to connect directly to the commercial and strategic choices the business is making.
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We know when to open up and when to narrow down
There is a time for exploration. There is also a point where choices need to be made. Our role is to help teams do both well.
3
We bring an outside view without ignoring what is already there
Clients rarely need another consultancy to arrive and start from a blank sheet of paper. We work with the strategy, insight and thinking that already exists, challenge it where useful and build from it where we can.
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We make the brief actionable
The end product needs to do more than look good in a presentation. It has to give innovation teams something they can actually create against.
In-market failure rates for innovation have sat between 80% and 95% for three decades, largely untouched by the money and resource businesses have thrown at the discipline. In our experience, the problem is rarely the ideas. It’s almost always the system managing them.
Innovation failure rates have sat between 80% and 95% for three decades, largely untouched by the money and resource thrown at the discipline. For innovation to survive the existential threat it currently faces, it must front up to the performance challenge.
When competitors attack, planning a coherent response in the heat of the moment is always harder than it looks. Drawing on three very different competitive challenges from recent client work, Justin Wright explores the strategic choices available – and why the best time to plan your response is before the threat arrives.
Thinking ‘outside the box’ is overrated. In our experience, there is always a box in which you need to operate – and being consciously constrained can be a powerful positive for innovation teams. Justin Wright makes the case for restricted innovation.
If the team has plenty of ideas but not enough clarity about which opportunities are genuinely worth pursuing, we can help turn the ambition into a tighter set of choices.
