A supplements innovation pipeline, from priorities to screen-ready ideas

The question

At a vitamins and supplements maker, every new idea had to clear a quantitative screen before development could begin.

Only ideas relevant and different enough would get through, for needs some years out. Before anyone wrote an idea, the innovation team wanted agreement on where to look: which health needs, and which kinds of solution, deserved its attention.

Our approach

Priorities came before ideas, agreed with the innovation team from a map of the category built from several angles.

Online reviews, semiotics, the company’s own research, interviews across the business and a digital ethnography each added a view, and the team chose with us which needs and solutions to pursue, so every later stage of the program started from ground it had picked.

Ideas were then built with the client’s team, its ingredient suppliers, who know what an ingredient can and can’t do, and people looking after their health in co-creation, each one written to meet the screen’s bar.

What the team came away with

Every concept headed for the screens traced back to a need the innovation team had chosen to pursue.

The agreed opportunity areas, each with starting points for ideas, gave the team ground to return to as the program moved through its stages, from the first round of ideas to needs further out, without starting the search again each time.

Suppliers had worked on the ideas from the start, so each concept was written with a view of what its ingredients could deliver. Rendered visuals let each one be judged as a product people could picture on the shelf.