Mapping adjacent growth for a consumer technology company

The question

A consumer technology company faced disruption in its core service, and looked to new products for growth, inside its category and beyond it.

Its executive innovation team first had to scope what its category now included, and whether free services counted as competition. Then it had to see which adjacent spaces, for consumers and for business partners, offered room to grow and a right to win, as the starting point for the next products it would build.

Our approach

We started wide, with a scan of the trends changing digital life across technology, culture, money and commerce, so every opportunity would be judged against where people’s lives were heading as well as where they were.

We talked with people about their whole digital lives, well beyond the company’s category, while analyst experts, the company’s own research and its stakeholders, and a wide scan of established competitors and newcomers built the competitive picture.

The executive innovation team then explored the trends and the evidence with us in workshops, and built and prioritized the opportunities itself, consumer and business ideas alike.

What the team came away with

The executive innovation team had a pipeline of scoped concepts, with the trends and competitive landscape behind them, drawn from all three lines of work.

Each concept was scoped for consumers, for business partners or for both, with the case for why the company could win there and the questions to answer before any commitment, from market size to concept testing.

Its adjacent moves could now be weighed together, on one footing, and the team knew what it didn’t yet know about each of them.