Innovation
We help FMCG innovation leaders understand what is holding performance back, identify where value is being lost and focus on the changes that will make the biggest improvement.
Our Innovation REMAP interrogates the whole innovation engine - not just the stage gate process - to diagnose the issues, benchmark what good looks like and build a practical plan for improving performance.
Innovation has changed a lot over the last 30 years
First came the age of ideas. The answer was more creativity, more brainstorming and more concepts. Then came the age of process. Stage gates, governance and systems brought much-needed discipline. More recently, we have had the age of speed. Sprints, MVPs and the drive to get things to market faster.
All of those shifts have improved innovation. But they have not solved the fundamental problem
"94% of senior executives are dissatisfied with their company's innovation outcomes."
Harvard Business Review (via McKinsey)Businesses are putting more resource into innovation without always seeing the same improvement in commercial return.
We believe the next phase has to be about performance
That means a more strategic and commercially accountable approach to innovation performance: making better choices, putting resource behind the right opportunities, stopping weaker projects earlier and creating an innovation engine capable of turning investment into stronger outcomes.
We call it Performance Innovation. It is not about taking creativity out of innovation. It is about making sure creativity has the best possible chance of creating value.
When innovation is not delivering, the process normally gets the blame. Sometimes the process is the problem but, often it is not.
In our experience, innovation performance is driven by the whole innovation engine. A weakness in one area can easily show up somewhere completely different.
That is why we look across three connected areas:
1
Strategic Precision
Are we clear enough about what we are trying to achieve?
2
Advanced Techniques
Are the mechanics of innovation helping the best ideas succeed?
3
Performance Boosters
Does the organisation around innovation help or hinder performance?
1
Strategic Precision
Are we clear enough about what we are trying to achieve?
Good innovation starts with good choices. That means having an innovation strategy that genuinely guides decisions, being clear on the level of ambition and the type of innovation the business is really looking for, building a portfolio that reflects those choices and knowing where resource should move as opportunities develop.
When we look at innovation strategy, portfolio management, resourcing and decision-making, one of the biggest performance drains we see is simply too many things being worked on with too little conviction.
Better innovation often starts with making fewer, better choices.
2
Advanced Innovation Techniques
Are the mechanics of innovation helping the best ideas succeed?
The process matters. But so does everything that happens around it.
A stage-gate system can be perfectly sensible on paper and still perform badly in practice. Teams can treat breakthrough innovation exactly like a low-risk line extension. Strong opportunity spaces can produce underwhelming ideas. And all the attention can go into getting something launched, with too little thought about what happens afterwards.
We look at the macro process - including how teams work within each stage - insights to ideas, post-launch nurture, and measurement and metrics.
Good innovation is not about making everything move faster. The important thing is having an approach that makes ideas stronger as they progress and reflects the job the innovation needs to do.
3
Performance Boosters
Does the organisation around innovation help or hinder performance?
Even the best strategy and process will struggle if the people and organisation around them are not set up to make them work.
Innovation cuts across functions. At some point it has to connect with brands, commercial teams, R&D, supply, finance and markets. That is where friction often starts.
We look at specialist capabilities, organisational structure and linkages, performance culture, and learning and knowledge management.
Innovation teams need more than project management. They need the confidence and capability to challenge, learn, make difficult decisions and work effectively across the wider organisation. In a world of AI, your people are becoming a key differentiator in innovation so you need to give them the conditions that fully unlock their potential.
This is one of the reasons innovation can be difficult to fix from inside the system. Everything is connected, so the symptom can sit a long way from the root cause.
What you see
"Our process is too slow."
The real issue
The innovation strategy may not be clear enough to make decisions quickly.
What you see
"Our pipeline isn't strong enough."
The real issue
Too many projects may be being kept alive and resource is being spread too thinly.
What you see
"We need better ideas."
The real issue
The opportunity spaces feeding those ideas may simply not be strong enough, or the process and decision-making are weakening ideas as they progress.
Our job is to get underneath the symptom and find the root cause
INNOVATION REMAP is our diagnostic for organisations that know their innovation engine could be performing better, but are not always clear why.
The name comes from performance motorsport. An engine remap is not a rebuild - it is about understanding where performance is being held back and making focused adjustments that can unlock a significant improvement.
We apply the same principle to innovation
We inspect the whole innovation engine, identify where performance is being lost and focus on the changes most likely to make the biggest difference.
We combine Mangrove's 25+ years of innovation experience with practical benchmarking of best practice from the innovation models, organisations and teams we have worked with and observed over that time.
The result: a clear view of what's working, what's getting in the way and what to do next
Ultimately, better innovation performance has to mean better return on investment. Not simply more ideas, more projects or faster processes, but more value from the time, money and resource being put into innovation. That tends to show up in a few ways:
Clearer choices
Teams know where innovation should play, what matters most and what they are prepared not to do.
A stronger portfolio
Resource moves towards the opportunities with the greatest potential rather than being spread evenly across everything in the pipeline.
Better decisions
Projects progress because the evidence supports them, not simply because somebody has invested time in them already.
Earlier, cheaper failure
Weak projects are stopped while they are still cheap to stop. Innovation should be a funnel, not a tunnel.
Stronger in-market outcomes
The goal is not simply to get things launched. It is to increase the chances that what reaches market has a genuine opportunity to succeed.
Better use of resource
Performance is not necessarily about putting more money into innovation. Often it is about getting more from what is already there.
Global Alcoholic Beverage Company
Building a better operating model for scalable innovation
Following earlier work on innovation typologies, we helped a global Spirits business rethink the operating model for its proven, close-in innovation. The work clarified the role of scalable "banker" innovations, shaped how proven opportunities could be reused across brands and markets, and looked across process, governance, KPIs and behaviours.
A clearer way to scale proven innovation more efficiently while freeing more resource for bigger future-facing bets.
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.
You probably don't need to rip it up and start again. You may just need to find the few things that are holding it back.
