“Innovate or die” was coined by the father of business management, Peter Drucker. “To be successful in the future, the rate of internal innovation must exceed the rate of external innovation. Your business will have to develop new ideas, products and services that your customers highly value, and you will have to do it faster than anyone else around you.” Written by Erica Brown in 2014, we are in the future. Her maxim is more urgent now because of the higher rate of change in customer needs, and greater number of competitors.

Achieving competitive advantage through customer-centricity requires finding new solutions for your customers, not customers for your new solution. Innovation can take many forms. It can be a new product or service solution, or a new process. It can be new as in never having previously existed, new as a result of an improvement, or a new combination of solutions.

Bring Your Innovation to Market with Greater Success and Less Risk

Innovation on its own rarely leads to market success. A Nielsen study reviewing 600 product launches across multiple markets and categories found that one-third of the initiatives failed as a function of insufficient Marketing support. Our approach to innovation is Marketing-led (knowledge of the market and customer base and pain points), and data-driven (intelligence, analytics, insights and data-modeling). We guide you through the five key innovation go-to-market components, from opportunity definition to post-launch success measurement.

1. Customer-centricity. Segmentation and target customer profiles and personas via customer insights. Problems solved and a map of the customer buying cycle/pipeline
2. Competitive leadership. Competitive intelligence and ecosystem mapping
3. Solution definition. Opportunity definition and sizing, entry points and cost of entry, solution offering, pricing and go-to-market strategy
4. Solution Marketing. Unique value proposition, channels, positioning, message map and messaging
5. Launch plan. Objectives and strategy, key performance indicators and performance targets

There are various methods for calculating innovation ROI. The real ROI is in the achievement of a higher level of customer-centricity, because customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable that companies that don’t focus on customers.

Why companies engage us. Our customers know innovating more quickly than their competitors is the key to thriving, because it provides both improved customer experience and increased competitive advantage.  Whether they need expertise or bandwidth, they find our experience with data and analytics valuable for making better market, customer, and solution launch decisions. They need experts, often with an outside perspective, who can help them build a best-practices go-to-market launch plan and process – experts who can de-risk innovation.

What we deliver. We bring all of our experience and expertise to bear to help you achieve the most successful solution launch:

• Primary and secondary research, data amalgamation, analytics, insights, and data-modeling to better understand customer and market needs
• Identification and ranking of potential segments/niches based on accessibility and opportunity
• Positioning statement, concept of singularity, brand promise, value proposition, and message map
• Go-to-Market Planning, covering the entire innovation process, from opportunity definition and sizing to launch effectiveness measurements
• Knowledge transfer throughout the entire process, so your team can follow the process for the next solution launch

“Not only did the results provide good guidance regarding market requirements, the company yielded information about their current product, reputation, market perception, and customer satisfaction. The most important attributes for a new product were identified as well as the trade-offs between these attributes. The company gathered more insight into how and where the user tends to use the product and their needs.” David Altounian, Chief Product Officer–Motion Computing

Thriving Companies Are Always Innovating

Leverage our expertise. Our capabilities and services range from gathering market requirements to concept testing and market validation to creating a go-to-market strategy, value proposition and positioning, to developing a plan that stimulates product adoption.

Let’s put our heads together to successfully launch your innovation designed to provide competitive advantage through an exceptional customer experience. Our expertise in this area lies in informing (data), developing and implementing the value creation-innovation (requirements gathering), testing (customer research), implementation (strategy, value prop, message map, etc.), introduction (measurable customer centric launch plan) and adoption (ongoing market and customer research) processes. Our knowledge and skill transfer; and change management, will help you achieve your objectives faster. We offer a robust, customized consulting engagement designed to address your unique needs.

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