Setting up an innovation project: the facts

In the following paragraphs, I would like to share with you our approach to innovation in its symbolic and structured representation. Starting with a few examples of failures in the implementation of innovation projects, I will illustrate the vision of our solution in its philosophy and then detail the major steps in the process leading to success.

The observation

People often come to us with the same difficulties, the same pain points. They had a great new business idea that would create a real growth opportunity for their company. They launched the development of the project at great expense because they thought they had THE right idea, like a deep intuition, a conviction drawn from experience in the sector. Unfortunately, the results are not so good and the difficulties to commercialize the product and to be profitable are quickly felt. The diagnosis is often quite simple. What about the existence of a customer need, a solution that fills a real customer pain point, the veracity of the value proposition or themarket's appetite for the envisaged business model... All these points (and many others) represent as many project risks to be secured when launching into the foggy world of innovation, where certainties are so many mirrors. Sometimes, luck smiles on us and our intuition turns out to be right. However, the probability of getting it right by intuition alone is low. Ignoring the security of these elements means rolling the dice on the potential success of your innovation. But innovation is expensive. We might as well limit the role of chance as much as possible in an operation that already involves enough risk not to add to it.

In another register, but always with the same conclusion, we also see these product improvement projects that start from a simple observation: my product is selling less and less. Sales are running out of steam and the arrival of competitors is leading me to a price war which, if I don't react, will sooner or later mean the death of what I live for today. The reflex in this kind of situation is this annoying tendency to say that, to get out of this spiral, we have to rethink the product by adding a whole range of new features in order to create competitive differentiation and increase the price/features ratio. But, as in the previous case, the sales of this new version are not doing any better than the previous product for a simple and good reason: people don't buy features. They buy the answer to their frustrations, the solution to their pain points. If the features added to the product solve some of their frustrations, then the interest will be there. This is the only way to create an innovation.

It is with this in mind, as illustrated by the two previous cases, that we have developed our approach to innovation projects, in order to help our clients with these high-stakes issues. The objective is very clear: to find out how to secure an innovation project, validate its potential and give it the maximum chance of success by reaching its market and achieving profitability.

The goal: To develop a new profitable business through innovation.

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