Innovation Strategy

The buzz around Innovation is something we witness day in and out. This isn’t limited to those whose lives are intertwined in a business-oriented landscape. The need for innovation has transcended these spheres and has now entered every process-based outcome, be it something as routine as brushing your teeth – because there’s always an innovative way of doing that! In an era of optimized living and future-forward thinking, the role of an Innovation Strategy Consultant is indispensable for organizations of all sizes. At Elephant, we excel at helping brands do both: Taking a leap when it comes to their outward-facing aspects like their products and services, while also streamlining internal processes to develop a comprehensive system that encourages a culture of innovation. Our offerings in this vertical are aimed towards ensuring that the time, money and other resources organizations often fruitlessly deploy in their innovation-based efforts are utilized in the most impactful manner possible. 

The Innovation Strategy Consultant You Need for Systemic Intervention

How can businesses stay relevant? While we often witness startup moguls fervently advocating for a need to innovate, the current landscape often sees their businesses on the way out within a year or two. In fact, the startups that do survive possess a solid innovation strategy but traditional, long-lasting businesses benefit most from it if they are to thrive in today’s versatile landscape. These are companies with a legacy quotient, where to stagnate is to lose one’s credibility in the market because there’s never a dearth of competitors waiting to fill that gap. 

The answer to relevance is directly connected to one’s capability to innovate: which means anticipating user needs well ahead of time and delivering solutions in a timely fashion so as to take advantage of current and future trends. But one might have a few justified questions when it comes to innovation strategy. In fact, it is a basic practice at Elephant to encourage our prospective clients to ask the following before availing of our stack of Innovation Strategy agency offerings.  

• Haven’t many brands climbed on the innovation bandwagon – and if so, have they succeeded?

• How can we ensure that our resources: both temporal and monetary are utilized correctly in the pursuit of innovation?

• What makes for a good partner if we are to approach an Innovation Strategy company?

• While generating innovative ideas is all well and good, how can we implement them effectively?

• What kind of changes will we need to make in order to implement a culture of Innovation?

We shall answer these questions and link them to Elephant’s offerings as we explore this vertical.

Bandwagoning & Resources

While many an Innovation Strategy consulting firm may make the claim of transforming your business, it is essential to look at history and subsequent methodology. A lot of big, thriving brands have taken the wrong step when it comes to blindly applying certain frameworks that did not suit their company ethos, vision or work culture – leading to unprecedented amounts of time and money being lost. 

At Elephant, we start by determining the focal touchpoints that the business, or brand needs to address first. A one-size-fits-all approach is extremely disastrous and can leave the organization is a worsened state, especially when it comes to making internal changes and adjustments. 

The right Innovation Strategy Consultant also focuses on outcome driven, consumer-centric approaches that involve exhaustive research and Elephant is no exception. Our team heavily draws on a customized framework, which is a synthesis of several tried and tested Design Thinking methodologies. We combine these with the best practices in the realm of corporate culture and governance to ensure that your time, money and resources aren’t spent on a bandwagoning, or trend-focused effort.          

The Ideal Innovation Strategy Consulting Firm

An ideal Innovation Strategy company does not focus on one aspect of Innovation culture, but takes a holistic approach. Current trends indicate that there is either inordinate focus on anticipating consumer needs via an incorrect application of brainstorming and other methods – or conversely, on the product development cycle where products that the market simply does not need are being pushed in the name of differentiation. 

Elephant remedies this by adopting a framework that addresses both, the internal and external spheres of the brand. We also offer highly targeted services upon client request – but this is recommended if the client is familiar with these frameworks and has researched their own organizational needs well. 

Implementation and Consistency

Design Thinking Workshops are a potent tool. They improve upon existing organizational processes like brainstorming sessions or creative sprints and help organizations think from a human-centric perspective when it comes to product/solution development. 

However, a lot of the ideas generated here can face hurdles when it comes to the field and there are primarily two reasons for this: the first is inadequate research, or research that doesn’t accurately capture unmet consumer needs. The second is far more profound – the lack of a concrete system of innovation. Any good innovation strategy consultant focuses on developing systems that align the interests of diverse groups within the organization, focuses on clear objectives and realistic goals and lastly, diverts the ideal number of resources in that direction to get the desired result. At Elephant, we value all of these equally to firstly build and then, sustain a culture of innovation that lasts the test of time. Our workshops leverage emerging technologies, nascent markets, new competition and lastly, changing consumer needs to provide customized processes that are reliable; especially where large investment amounts are concerned.    

Leadership and the Culture of Innovation   

The most important changes need to come from the top for even decidedly decentralized, hierarchy-less organizations. Leadership plays a key role, where business leaders need to correctly understand both: their organizational needs as well as consumer needs in order to provide a correct, healthy assessment. 

Beyond that, the willingness to open oneself to design thinking concepts that seem vague and subjective in a world of rigid objectivity can also be a challenge. These attitudes percolate through the organization, whether one likes it or not – and it is often best to have a synchronized approach that the team can get behind.    

Our catalogue of Innovation Strategy agency services includes the following offerings that aim to educate, streamline and subsequently, implement the culture of Innovation at all levels of the organization to create true differentiation and a lasting legacy as far as the brand is concerned. Primarily, these are:

1. Design Thinking workshops & interventions for innovative idea synthesis in tandem with process & asset creation for business functions.

2. Road-mapping for future products & services as tangible business value drivers.

3. The human-centric digital transformation of internal processes & service experiences

4. Working with organizations to create an innovation culture that sustains transformations

We also predominantly use the following tools to achieve results. However, these are constantly subject to scrutiny and upgradation depending on industry trends and analysis. Lastly, our offerings involve a collaborative effort where we amply borrow on the expertise of our other dedicated teams to provide the optimal solution as needed. 

• Qualitative user research

• Behavior insight harvesting

• Blue-ocean thinking methods

• Whitespace Identification

• Design Thinking application expertise

• Trend analysis

• Innovation inducing asset creation

• Fail-fast strategy

• Contextual idea anchoring

• Value maps