Innovation Consulting for New Product Development & Service Business Innovation

When it comes to breakthroughs, even the most innovative companies face significant challenges. From wrestling with the “fuzzy front end” of the innovation process, to identifying and prioritizing opportunities, to moving concepts through the pipeline, there’s no magic formula for success.

Most companies recognize that new products and services are the lifeblood of the future – and that it is imperative to maintain an abundant pipeline of product and service concepts that range from line extensions to breakthroughs. The challenge is a formidable one: extend existing products to maximize their contribution throughout their lifecycle while concurrently introducing compelling new offerings that may potentially cannibalize the existing portfolio or create new categories of growth.

Regardless of the industry, organizations often face common challenges related to driving new product, service and category innovation, including:

  • Identifying promising opportunity areas
  • Moving beyond massive amounts of consumer data to gain meaningful insights
  • Translating insights into breakthrough business concepts
  • Prioritizing and selecting the most promising opportunities
  • Championing and defending fragile ideas through the innovation process
  • Building the organizational alignment required for successful execution

Questions that keep you awake at night:

  • How can we gain confidence around which opportunity areas to pursue?
  • How can we get bigger and better ideas into our pipeline?
  • We have great technology but how do we successfully “productize” it?
  • How can gain deeper insights into emerging consumer and customer needs, and then integrate these insights into the product innovation process?
  • How can we develop and institutionalize a process to continually innovate new products, services, and even business models?

InnovationPoint’s approach to new product, service and category innovation takes the visionary high ground, seeking to conceptualize, develop, test and introduce breakthrough opportunities that inspire consumers/customers and, in some cases, spur disruptive innovation. Our approach involves:

Industry Foresight” – A deep understanding of the drivers, trends, dislocations, opportunities and enablers of an industry to establish a participation strategy that creates a leadership position in the marketplace.

Customer Insight” – A non-traditional approach to consumer/customer research that seeks understanding at a level well beyond what is articulated, and then interprets these inputs and translates them into truly inspired opportunities.

Strategic Alignment” – An approach for engaging both the leadership team and the broader organization around a shared path for growth. This alignment enables buy-in, accelerates decision-making and ensures rapid implementation.

By tapping into the power of foresight and insight, we help you step back and understand the broad opportunity space, so we can innovate from a new vantage point. Unlike many consulting firms that jump hastily to “concept-level ideation”, we then work with you to define your most promising “growth platforms”. Inspired by customer surprises and emerging trends, these growth platforms represent powerful ideation “springboards” that lead to the creation of multiple, product, service and solution concepts.

Our proprietary approach to new product, service and category innovation delivers a portfolio of offerings from incremental to breakthrough, and from short- to long-term. By aiming high – and by seeking to identify longer-term growth platforms and related concepts – it becomes possible to innovate strategically. Even when our focus is new products or services, we also help articulate the overarching strategic requirements for their ultimate success.

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