Research Services

Innovation & Transformation

Mandate to Propel and Commercialize Transformative Change

In an environment that seems to be set permanently on “fast-forward,” companies have come to view innovation — in all its forms — as a key mandate. Whether meant merely to originate novel products and services, or fundamentally restructure the market, innovation programs must be keenly sensitive to emerging and latent needs, drivers of cultural transformation, and signs of customer and corporate capacity for change.

Of course, the high upside associated with market transformation shouldn’t divert attention from lifecycle management strategies that keep portfolios robust through incremental improvement. Companies aiming to stimulate change need to conceive of the process as a continuum spanning evolutionary enhancement to paradigm-altering innovation. And they need to keep a watchful eye on opportunities at both ends of that spectrum.

Effective stewards of innovation do three things very well:

Inspiration · Read cultures and customers to find convergence between latent needs, social trends, and technological possibilities

Validation · Conceptualize and scope innovation opportunities by aligning technological possibilities with market capacity for change

Commercialization · Chart a path to commercial success by anticipating requirements for adoption, potential market size and rate of uptake

OUR 100-YEAR HISTORY OF GUIDING CHANGE

As the world’s first business research organization, National Analysts Worldwide has been helping clients drive and reshape their markets for over a century, often using techniques that were developed or first applied by our own firm. Even the integration of market research with a true business consulting model was conceived here.

Our approach to Innovation & Transformation reflects that historical stewardship of market change across a range of industries. Many of the paradigm-changing products of the last century came to marketing fruition under our guidance. As we enter our 2nd century, we continue to help clients change their markets and change the world.

The Business Innovation Paradox

Commercial innovation is challenged by the inherent tension — and implied contradiction — between disruption and predictability:

Creativity vs. Discipline. Even business cultures bent on rapid change confront conflict between discipline and creativity. Entrepreneurial businesses without traditional corporate structure can appear advantaged by the sort of open-wall thinking that better-established corporations must work to achieve. In fact, however, the “search” for innovation is not an undisciplined process. Ingenuity is propelled by systematic thinking and structured investigation.

Change Management vs. Risk Management. Large corporations have the resources and discipline to innovate but they often struggle to execute because their standards of accountability, like their structure, may seem to conflict with free-wheeling creativity. Innovators are obligated to employ a process that supports corporate stewardship as effectively as it advances innovation.

Prediction vs. Imagination. In a customer-centric business model, sound decisions appear to rest on market permission to innovate. But “innovation research” requires our customers to predict acceptance of hard-to-conceive solutions designed for as yet unimagined or unacknowledged problems. Long horizons and new paradigms can make prediction seem like sorcery — unless customers can be made to see the world through a visionary lens.

To Think ‘Outside the Box,’ You Need to Understand the Framework

Our approach to innovation supports flexible and inventive thinking within the framework of systematic commercial process to ensure effective business decisions. That multi-step framework begins with “Inspiration,” proceeds through “Validation,” and concludes with “Commercialization.”

INSPIRATION · Effective innovation begins with an inspirational process by multiple perspectives:

The Internal Vision Process begins within the organization as a process of corporate self-assessment that ladders up from current capabilities to aspirational technologies. The goal is to stimulate and tap internal thinking about capacity to drive change and map those capabilities both.
The External Horizon Process engages with current and prospective consumers of innovation to fully understand the environment from a cultural and commercial perspective, and to explore market capacity for change. This phase can incorporate traditional and non-traditional exploratory and ideation work, including in-home and web ethnography, social media co-creation platforms, “what-if” scenario-building, secondary-data mining, and workshops to marry technological possibilities with commercial opportunities. Finding the right customers to inform the process and helping them to connect with a distant future can be crucial.

VALIDATION · Validation generally relies on a suite of prognostic techniques customized to the marketplace and the breadth of options under consideration:

The Optimization Process uses a flexible and customized suite of trade-off modeling tools to enhance product design in ways that optimize outcomes for key segments while also extending the predictive timeframe. Multi-stage simulation models are designed to telescope the innovation timeframe so that it is possible to reach further into the future.
The Forecasting Process employs a diverse portfolio of predictive models that integrate the input of multiple stakeholders, sometimes incorporating Delphi models that seek consensus from small groups of visionary customers and thought leaders.

COMMERCIALIZATION · Once opportunities and success drivers have been identified, a coherent research program guides key steps along the path to commercialization:

Market Mapping ensures that the market structure and its inherent barriers and leverage opportunities are understood.
Market Development considers and tests the mechanisms of structural change needed to enable innovation to take hold.
Launch Strategy encompasses a program of positioning strategy and tactical communication from concept to execution.

A Portfolio of Tools for Better Thinking

The challenge of innovation can’t be met by a tool-centric approach. It requires an inventive approach to methods as well as an openness to better ways of using available techniques, and better ways of thinking about the things they teach us. Innovation sometimes profits as much from the oldest tools of the trade as the very newest.

That’s why we have always maintained a comprehensive portfolio of methods and processes that expand thinking rather than confine it. We organize ourselves around marketing problems and markets — not signature techniques or nail-seeking hammers — with the support of nationally recognized in-house methodologists who function as integrated members of our innovation project teams. Among the techniques that support innovation are:

Deft qualitative and ethnographic research (individuals, groups and social communities) in the hands of practitioners who work as ongoing members of the project team to facilitate recognition and effective application of important ideas
Extensive suite of modeling tools, developed or customized by our own methodologists, that include adaptive and iterative conjoint techniques to stretch the modeling horizon without burdening respondents
Specialized quantitative approaches that reflect an understanding of where unmet needs may truly lie, including outlier analysis, adaptive tradeoff models, and dynamic segmentation

For more information on National Analysts Worldwide, please e-mail us or call (215) 496-6800.