Necessity is the mother of invention

We’ve seen some great examples of organisations that have responded well to changing markets and have been able to pivot or extend existing capabilities to either temporarily or permanently go after new opportunities. For some businesses the adjustments required have been small and they can carry on trading (even prospering) or hunker down until business-as-usual resumes.

For others the impact of necessary responses to Covid-19 are more profound. If you work within one of these businesses, you’ve either spotted an opportunity to innovate or the search is definitely on. For those that need to innovate new products or services to survive, the challenge is to quickly get enough clarity for the vision, consensus around the ambition and confidence in the roadmap to market.

Success lies in following a creative and collaborative process that engages colleagues and customers to imagine, design, evaluate, prototype and deploy new solutions. A balance needs to be struck between moving at a more experimental and faster pace to seize the moment and demonstrating enough rigour and evidence to reassure decision-makers.

Some problems you may be trying to solve for your business:

• We’d like to see all of this as an opportunity to innovate our products, but we’re forced into focusing on immediate issues and responding on the ground.
• We have a commercial need or have spotted an opportunity to bring a new service to market and we want to ensure it’s designed well, and the experience is great.
• We need to engage and involve our customers and suppliers quickly and creatively to get their input and get this moving.
• We need to show value to partners in our ecosystem as we don’t have the capabilities to do this all on our own.
• We need a vision and to prototype, pilot and test with speed, to convince senior leaders that the opportunity we’ve spotted is worth pursuing.
• We’re going to create a start-up alongside our core business, but this approach is new to us, we don’t have the skills or tools in our team.
• We have stock, assets and resources but our conventional route to market is shut down and we may have to rethink our sales channels.
• Whilst we need a quick fix to ensure survival, new offerings must feel reliable, robust and relevant to our brand.

Let’s help you get a plan to:

Identify, design and evaluate a new commercial opportunity quickly to inform the decision to go ahead.

What this will deliver:

1. New revenue from new products and services to bolster and infill lost revenue from existing ones.
2. An accelerated time to market to realise benefits quickly. Through a structured, creative and collaborative approach a business and value proposition can be implemented so new revenue can come on stream as soon as possible.
3. An innovation pathway with a defined CAPEX allocation. A project can be established with defined CAPEX allocation that can be assessed commercially without impacting the core operation and current revenue effort.
4. New and retained customers for whom you’ve delivered new value propositions, products and services.

How Engine can help:

• We’re great at engaging teams in creative and collaborative sprints to reveal fresh ideas inspired by stand-out examples from within and beyond your sector.
• We’ll help you take a commercial opportunity that you’ve spotted and created compelling propositions, services and experiences.
• We can look creatively at your business’s capabilities, fixed assets and resources to imagine new lines of business and innovative service models.
• We’ll help you envision a more pandemic-proof version of your business and services and convince others it’s the future.
• We can work with you to sell in the vision and value case to stakeholders, decision-makers and delivery teams, from the boardroom to the frontline.
• We’ll work with internal experts to ensure solutions are grounded in operational realities and business capabilities, so getting to market faster and intact.
• We’ve delivered projects just like this with leading brands in automotive, manufacturing, financial services and consumer tech, amongst others.