Everybody needs inspiration on how to take their business to the next level … and that’s exactly what Catalyst does. Robert Hitomi, Director, E-Commerce, Electronic Arts
Your company talks about innovation, but results are mixed. It’s not that there aren’t good ideas floating around. It’s that ideas don’t consistently convert into market successes. Ideas seem to have become more incremental than breakthrough. The bottom line: new product efforts aren’t paying off.
Harness New Product or Service Growth Opportunities
Catalyst Strategies breaks through the clutter to help find the next source of new product or service revenue. For many clients, we identify new product opportunities that are synergistic with their portfolio but fall outside traditional business units. Other clients look to us to refine existing product/service offerings. Our product innovation approach includes:
- Assessment of business goals
- Crystallization of the company’s product innovation and development process
- Review of company core competencies, competitive landscape, and market dynamics
- Identification and screening of potential product or service options
- Definition of product requirements
- Transformation of ideas into meaningful streams of revenue
Identify Innovative Concepts
We use rigorous and proven methodologies to generate exciting new product or service concepts and to fine-tune existing ones for maximum revenue potential. Clients get traction in the market because the concepts we deliver are:
- Market Driven – Concepts are based on customer needs, emerging market trends, competitive blind spots, and clients’ capabilities to identify strategic opportunities
- Practical – Concepts take into account the company’s competencies, existing portfolio, and brand equity
- Fact Based – We define ideas, positioning, pricing, and feature set using qualitative and quantitative concept and multivariate testing
- Structured – We inform each “Go/No Go” gate based on pre-defined criteria; concepts are measured on market feedback operational requirements and a robust business case
- Actionable – Concepts are converted into clear and concise business requirements and go-to-market plans to ensure a successful launch and P&L
Training Teams to “Do it Yourself”
We often work closely with product management teams to define or refine their product development process and incorporate the best practices we are using in the development process. Our process recommendations are designed to fit with the existing culture, structure, and governance of the organization. Our baseline product development process includes the following steps:
- Discovery – Capturing and analyzing target customer needs, competitive activities, and market trends, and translating these findings into product/service opportunities
- Ideation – Developing new concepts that address the customer needs and marketplace gaps identified in the discovery phase
- Scoping – Analyzing, at high-level, the feasibility and market potential of the opportunity
- Business Case Optimization – Defining the concept in depth and developing a detailed business case including cost/benefit analysis and success metrics
- Design and Testing – Validating customer interest, measuring potential demand, and confirming the degree of differentiation from competition potential customers perceive
- Go-to-Market Planning – Designing the product or service and customer experience; executing design reviews; building the go-to-market plan; setting up appropriate partnerships; testing the product or service in market; building a development roadmap based on market needs, profitability requirements, and the realities of resource constraints
- Detailed Operations Development – Developing the product or service; building marketing and operational components, implementing the people, processes, and system requirements to deliver the defined customer experience
- Launch and Tracking – Establishing KPIs and other performance metrics, then establishing tracking mechanisms
Deliver Innovation ROI
Our success in product innovation is based on two critical principles:
- Successful concept development is based on deep insight into customer needs and needs gaps
- The use of a predetermined set of gate criteria drives all go/no go decisions
Call us if you need to build more certainty around turning promising ideas into marketplace winners.
