Innovation pathways
Challenging, collaborative and always enjoyable, we’ve honed three product and service innovation pathways to bring clarity, reveal high-value opportunities, and make the intangible, tangible.
Accelerate / Explore / Evolve
One of these pathways is for you, if any of the following are true:
- You have an idea for a new product, proposition or service, but you’re not sure where to start
- You’re being disrupted by an external force, and want to work out how to respond
- You used to be in first place, but not so much anymore
- You need to align a set of stakeholders around a clear, shared understanding of the near future and how to get there
Accelerate
Launching a new digital product or service
Accelerate is perfect for businesses looking to launch a new product or service and quickly define how it attracts an audience, engages them, and evolves their experience over time. This approach to product/service innovation reveals opportunities, builds alignment and sets out clear practical steps to take things to the next stage.
What you'll get
As we create the product strategy and vision, we build consensus amongst product teams and wider stakeholders, ensuring the genesis of the service is owned and bought into by the business. The following three key elements help us align around the opportunity.
- An Experience Strategy
It sets out how people will experience the new product or service and how it evolves: a bespoke framework of audience takeaways, design principles, unique experience themes, opportunities, and Ownable Moments™. - Audience shift
Through the creation of audience archetypes and an Experience Blueprint, we explore the behavioural shift our product and service aims to bring about in our audiences. We define the Experience Arc that will take our product from first release towards a vision that tunes into the pain points of our audiences. - Prototypes and roadmap
High-fidelity CX prototype(s) demonstrate the features, functions, interactions, and Ownable Moments™ across the customer lifecycle. The product roadmap shows the way forward towards a market launch. The emergent UI and interaction design system provides a tangible set of assets to accelerate detailed product design.
Accelerate case study
Accelerating SmartWealth
UBS set us the challenge to help them democratise 150 years of premium Swiss banking heritage. Read how we went from idea to prototype in just 90 days. Together, we launched a wealth ‘robo-advisor’ for the masses in 18 months.
Explore
Uncovering the next big service idea
Explore is for businesses that don’t have a specific service in mind but want to probe the future and explore opportunities to reimagine their current offer. This approach delivers clarity, the case for change, and a suite of product or service concepts that drive customer behaviour shifts on three horizons – now (within 6 months), next (6–12 months), and in future (18+ months).
What you'll get
A range of experience concepts designed to create customer behaviour shifts across now, next and future horizons, vetted and prioritised by key stakeholders.
- Experience Blueprint
The Experience Blueprint details the end-to-end CX, mapping the channels, touchpoints and actors at play in the experience. It enables everyone to have a shared view of the opportunities and input into the service experience. - Customer propositions and service concepts
A comprehensive suite of now, soon, and future service concepts to create the behaviour shift in our audiences. These ideas and concepts are visualised and prioritised against feasibility, desirability and suitability. - Experience Framework
The Experience strategy contains the service model, vision and Experience Arc of the opportunity area(s). Audience takeaways, design principles, and Ownable Moments™ create the structure for how the opportunity could play out into a high-level experience roadmap. - Audience definition & shifts
Through the creation of audience archetypes, we explore the behavioural shift our product and service ideas aim to bring about in our audiences.
Explore case study
Exploring with Nivea
Service concepts that help build an intimate one-to-one relationship with your skin.
Evolve
Making incremental improvements for maximum impact
Evolve unlocks significant value from your existing digital estate. This is an incremental innovation approach to improving a product or service that’s already in-market.
What you'll get
An assessment of how well your digital estate performs to support and engage the needs of your customer, along with strategies to improve the current state, and a set of sprints to evolve this incrementally.
- Audit
We’ll look at how current journeys through your digital estate perform against key tasks and objectives, benchmark against your competition as well as lateral product/services, and build a blueprint to uncover the highest value areas of improvement. - Audience understanding
A set of personas describing the needs, desires and pain points of the audiences we’re designing for, and the behaviour shift we aim to bring about in them. - Benchmark report
Your report will clearly outline a grade for the current experience across each key journey, where you sit against your competitors, as well as where the potential change might happen. - Sprints
Based on the agreed objectives and timescale, each sprint will focus on a set of prioritised small, medium and large improvements, along with all associated design assets.
Evolve case study
Evolving the Fred. Olsen digital estate
For Fred. Olsen Cruise Lines, we created a digital vision to equal their exceptional service at sea. We synchronised strategy and tactics within a compressed timeline and the results smashed all targets. Digital revenues hit the same figures for 6 months in 2023 as the whole of their last normal year in 2019.
Talk to us about the Accelerate, Explore or Evolve innovation pathways.