Innovation is essential to your business strategy, sustainability, and new growth in the ever-evolving digital ecosystem.
Gaining and maintaining a competitive advantage requires a thoughtful innovation strategy, along with the capabilities to engage future customers, reduce risk, leverage new technologies, and make impactful change.
Unlike traditional growth strategy or innovation consulting firms, we don’t just crunch the numbers. We help craft a holistic innovation strategy that supports your overall business strategy while also grounding your innovation process in the realities of user value and design capabilities.
Structuring the Innovation Journey
Whether it’s creating new products and services, reaching new markets, or building new business models, Highland helps you implement business strategy planning and sets you up for ongoing success. Our innovation consulting experts collaborate closely with your in-house team to implement top innovation systems and processes, and drive innovation with a design thinking oriented approach.
- Move from insights to ideas and value offers: Our team of innovation experts and strategists translate research findings and behavioral insights into tangible opportunities and value propositions for your target audience. Helping to discover and define the offer to your users—whether through your product, service, or experience—is the guiding force behind the best innovation strategy.
- Build a coherent business case around new opportunities: Our methodology delivers a holistic and rational business model based on new opportunities that connect to customer needs. Together, we work to boost your innovation capabilities in feasible and practical ways.
- Get aligned with all stakeholders: Innovation management and transformation touches the entire organization. By working with stakeholders across all levels of your company, you’ll improve alignment on how to implement, scale, and measure impact. Together, we’ll identify any organizational changes that result as part of the process.
Creating a Coherent Plan
Getting to a sound innovation strategy framework is an essential first step in creating value for your organization and your customers and users. Activities include crystallizing the value you offer, defining implementation structures, aligning around success measures, and defining a now-next-later growth plan.
- Mapping end-to-end competencies: We’ll define the steps that it takes to move your product innovation forward, but continue to identify and track data-driven benchmarks and metrics to ensure your strategy is on target as it is being implemented.
- Ensuring business & mission alignment: By regularly bringing cross-function teams together, we help you get thinking about innovation roadmaps, implementation challenges, and organizational changes along your path.
- Innovate with confidence: No more speculation and uncertainty about the path forward. Our work is guided by your customers: their behavior, emotions, and needs. This human-centered connection helps to ensure that your business model innovation process balances user desires, stakeholder interests, and business goals.
Whether you are launching a new product or service or expanding on your existing business model, it’s important to align core business stakeholders around the direction and purpose of your innovation strategy and initiatives. With a strong foundation and internal alignment, you’ll put yourself in the best position for top innovation advancement and increased value generation for your users.
Our Innovation Consulting Services
Inviting disruption into your business environment and shaking things up can feel daunting. That’s why it’s important to work with a trusted and experienced innovation consulting group. At Highland, we’re a team of global innovation experts spanning service designers, human-centered product designers, business innovation consultants and more.
We’ve been helping startup entrepreneurs, SMBs and well-established organizations across the USA for decades. We’d love to help you too. Find out how Highland’s innovation strategy consulting services could be impactful in capturing new opportunities for your business.
Creative Group
Creative Group, a corporate travel and events company, wanted to grow with a new synergistic offering. Their opportunity was to design and deliver employee and customer incentive programs themselves, rather than continuing to rely on other large providers. They engaged Highland to help design and launch a product that would stand out from the status quo and drive growth for the company.
The Highland team of innovation experts led Creative Group through an innovation process, drawing on behavioral research, competitive analysis, market research, and user insights to craft a best-in-class, stand-out product concept.
The final outcome was a distinctive new digital product that could out-compete established providers. Its customer-centric offering was a hit, and resulted in a critical new revenue stream during the pandemic when Creative Group’s travel and event business paused.
