Innovate
Innovation is often confused with a great idea, a spark of creativity or a flash of genius. In fact, it’s a process.
Most companies have no difficulty generating ideas. The problem is that most of these ideas get lost internally, or make no impact on the market.
How do you ensure an idea leads to innovation? By fostering an environment where employees share their ideas. By selecting the best ideas, exploring them from every possible angle, and redesigning them to maximize their potential. By developing them to a point where they can be launched with minimal risk.
Innovation is a process that requires time and effort – but which reaps significant rewards.
Strategic Research helps clients throughout the innovation process, from generating ideas and insights to estimating the market potential for an idea, and optimizing product mix.
How strong is your idea? Confirm market potential and optimize your offer
In the real world, ideas succeed or fail by a process of natural selection. But failure is expensive.
Strategic Research minimizes the risks associated with innovation by working with brands to assess the strength and potential of their ideas. We put in place client-tailored approaches to assess and quantify a specific market’s size, characteristics and components.
We test and screen concepts using our exclusive methodology Blue Potential™. This standardized tool enables us to identify factors, however unexpected, that point to the likely future success of a product or service. How does it differentiate itself from similar offers? Will it attract new customers? Will it achieve the advertiser’s holy grail: to stand out so much that it generates buzz, thereby entering a virtuous circle of success?
These factors are important indicators of success, because consumers are typically risk-averse. Truly innovative products tend to register low purchase intent, because lack of exposure and knowledge makes customers unwilling to buy it immediately. As such, declared purchase intent is an unreliable indicator for radical innovations.
Finally, using tools such as conjoint analysis, we help you optimize your offer by testing and identifying the combination of products and product features preferred by consumers.
Don’t just analyze the market. Create it.
Market research principles and methods help generate ideas by removing the fear and risk that comes with innovation. But they don’t create revolutions.
Why? Consumers are not particularly good at generating revolutionary new ideas. They tend to want more of what they already like. No consumer panel ever announced it wanted a tablet computer, or a phone that could tell you what the weather was like on the opposite side of the world.
We are increasingly urging our clients to question standard innovation processes, which produce solidly performing line extensions, but no big ideas. Big ideas are born from a new way of analyzing the market, and breaking free from the competition rather than going head-to-head with it.
We are recognized experts in Blue Ocean Strategy, a strategic analysis method developed by professors at INSEAD to create new market spaces in which your brand can thrive.
