Innovation Consulting
We use a range of best in-class innovation tools and methodologies – from Design Thinking, Lean, and Behavioral Design to Open Innovation, Experimental Design, and Agile – to craft, build, and launch solutions.
Explore
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Market Research and Product Strategy
We conduct early-stage due diligence, such as market overview, competitive analysis, market sizing, and industry trends, to design the initial product strategy and roadmap.
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User Research
We conduct research to drive product innovation or improve existing deployments. We plan, execute, and analyze quantitative methods (such as surveys) and qualitative ones (such as interviews and usability testing) to accurately profile customer segments, understand their behavior, and articulate their needs.
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Data Analysis
By identifying, mining, and combining user data across product, marketing channels, and operations, we yield powerful insights on how users are currently interacting across the product value-chain.
Elaborate
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Business Model Design
We map the holistic, integrative business model of an initial idea, and consider not only product features and customer segments but also revenue and cost drivers, strategic partnerships, user experience, and delivery channels.
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Product and Service Design
We help design product requirements, prototypes, technology use-case flows, and other outputs such as value propositions, customer segmentation, and channel optimization. We also assist in prioritizing new and existing products and features to assemble a winning portfolio.
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User Experience and User Interface Design
We design end-to-end user experiences (UX) and journey maps to ensure user needs are met through all touchpoints, as well as service blueprints to define how multiple stakeholders contribute. We design clear, coherent user interfaces for digital products so customers can easily understand and use your product.
Experiment
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Product and Service Development
We work with your team to bring best-in-class practices from Agile and Stage-Gate methodologies to efficiently build your product or service.
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Pilot Testing
We embed a rigorous "design of experiment" infrastructure that identifies success metrics, early adopter segments, sample sizes, and back-end reporting for your pilot test. We then perform statistical analysis to validate specific hypotheses. This process helps optimize the product feature set, thereby greatly increasing the ROI for a full-scale roll-out.
Innovation Capabilities
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Digital Transformation
We begin by conducting a 360 review of the organization – its suite of products, internal capabilities, and customer segments – as well as external trends and factors to design an appropriate strategy. We then define the internal processes, data capabilities, delivery channels, and IT infrastructure needed to execute that design.
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Innovation Lab Set-Up
For those looking to systematize the innovation process, we design the overall architecture of your organization’s innovation unit. This covers functional roles, incentive structure, tools, methodologies, and cultural norms needed to design and develop a suite of innovative products and services in a structured, efficient manner.
Specialty Services
We offer several proprietary innovation approaches to address more complex problems for our client partners.
Blue Sky™
Rather than incremental enhancements to a product or service, we focus on how we can completely reimagine it, using a series of facilitation workshops with a cross-functional client team. We lean on a “first principles and no constraints” approach to develop genuinely groundbreaking and disruptive ideas.
Speedboat™
Larger organizations often struggle with rapidly and cost-effectively testing out initial hypotheses and ideas. Using Speedboat, in a matter of weeks, we design and validate concepts with users, while also checking on the overall feasibility.
100-Day Relay™
In a series of predefined 1 to 4-week sprints conducted jointly with the client team, we rapidly move from the initial idea to an in-market test in just 100 days.
Innovation Training
We provide training on several innovation topics for your team, either as stand-alone, customized training, or as part of a broader consulting engagement.
Discovery and Design
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Design Thinking
Design Thinking (aka Human-Centered Design) involves uncovering insights from a target user group, devising ideas, and testing them using simple prototypes. We explain how this differs from traditional user research, and advocate how to make the approach “lightweight” so that teams can move quickly and cost-effectively.
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Lean Start-Up
This approach is useful for any organization – not only start-ups – to build something new under extreme conditions of uncertainty. It emphasizes both a “build-first” approach and a quantitative measurement of success.
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Behavioral Design
This is concerned explicitly with designing products or touchpoints to change user behavior. We discuss proven, pragmatic approaches to assess the current behavior and consider which tactics and messaging will have the desired effect.
Build and Launch
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Agile Methodology
Agile guides how cross-functional teams organize themselves to break down projects into smaller tasks. This allows them to move in rapid time-frames while being responsive to changing customer needs. We discuss both the highlights and the limitations of the approach, as well as indicate when Agile is less likely to be effective.
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State-Gate Model
Stage-Gate emphasizes a process-driven approach to product development, and is best suited for more predictable projects or when working across larger teams and external parties. We discuss the specific inputs, outputs, and decision gates for each step of the process, and compare it with other approaches such as Agile.
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Pilot Testing and Experimentation
Testing an idea on a small scale is a core part of the innovation process, yet few teams do it well. This methodology explains how to design an experiment to prove whether to move forward with the idea and optimize the solution feature-set to maximize user adoption and financial returns.
Marketing
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Market Sizing and Customer Segmentation
We explain how best to estimate a new product's overall market size, either in total revenue or number of users. We also highlight how to accurately segment customers and how to identify potential “early adopters” of a new product.
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Pricing New Products
While getting pricing right is a mix of art and science, we review several quantitative and qualitative techniques to estimate a plausible price for a new product.
Advanced Topics
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Organizational Design
Though often overlooked, having the right type of organizational structure, culture, and mindset is vital to drive innovation. We discuss nine key building blocks to set the proper foundation for the team to design and execute on an ongoing basis.
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Disruptive Innovation
Few sectors are undergoing as much disruption as financial services. We discuss the principles of disruption and describe how start-ups typically target business lines of established companies. Similarly, we examine how these incumbents can defend against challengers.
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Open Innovation
While financial institutions traditionally guarded all of their ideas, systems, and information to outsiders, recent trends in technology (e.g., APIs) and regulation (e.g., open banking) have changed that. We review several ways to collaborate with outside parties throughout the innovation funnel and highlight ways to monetize them.
Explore our work
