Innovation Strategy

Innovation strategy consulting is the work of deciding what a company will innovate in, what gets funded in what order, against which criteria, and who holds the authority to stop something. It is a capital allocation and governance question before it is a creative one, and it is only worth anything once delivery is attached to it. Vivaldi has done this work since 1999, including category and product innovation strategy for Coca-Cola, Danone, McDonald’s and Bank of America.

• Since 1999innovation strategy and delivery
• 200+published case studies
• 10 officeson four continents
• 5xWirtschaftsWoche Best of Consulting, Strategy and Innovation

When companies bring us in

• Innovation spend is spread across dozens of small initiatives, none of them large enough to change a number, and nobody can say which three matter most.
• The pipeline is full and the launch record is thin, because concepts are screened on enthusiasm and availability rather than on criteria written down in advance.
• A category is reorganizing around a need the current portfolio was never built to serve, and leadership needs to decide where the company will play before it decides what to build.
• Projects are easy to start and almost impossible to stop, so capital stays locked in work that stopped being promising two gates ago.
• A strategy exists on slides and the organization is not building against it, because no owners, sequence or funding tranches were ever attached.

Why a full pipeline is not an innovation strategy

Most innovation programs are measured on activity. Ideas generated, workshops run, concepts in the funnel, initiatives in flight. All of it is genuinely easy to produce and none of it is a strategy, because a strategy is defined by what it refuses to fund. A pipeline with forty live concepts is usually a company that has avoided the decision rather than one that has made many.

The cost of that avoidance is rarely a failed launch. It is dilution. Budget, senior attention and the few people who can actually ship get spread thinly enough that the genuinely large bets never get the resources to clear their own risk, while small adjacent work keeps getting approved because each piece is cheap enough not to need a hard conversation. The portfolio ends up with no single initiative capable of moving the company, and no mechanism that would have caught it.

The second failure is slower. Where there are no written criteria, screening becomes a preference exercise, and the ideas that survive are the ones with the most senior sponsor rather than the strongest evidence. Once that pattern sets, killing anything becomes a political act instead of a routine one, and the portfolio loses the ability to recycle capital out of work that is not going to clear.

We treat innovation strategy as a portfolio and governance problem. A small number of named territories the company intends to build in. Criteria agreed before the ideas arrive. An allocation across horizons that someone has signed. Stage gates with real kill rights, and a named person who exercises them. Then a delivery sequence, because a strategy nobody builds against is a slide.

What our innovation strategy consulting services include

1. Innovation ambition and the portfolio frame

What the innovation portfolio is actually for, stated as a number and a date: how much of the growth plan it has to carry, by when, and therefore how much risk the company must be willing to hold. Without that, every later argument about whether a concept is too ambitious or too safe has no reference point. We set the ambition with the CFO in the room, not after.

2. Platform architecture: the few territories worth funding

A small number of named platforms, each one a territory the company has a credible right to build in, grounded in demand rather than in internal capability maps. Each platform carries its own rationale, its own evidence of demand, and an explicit statement of what it excludes. This is the step that turns a list of ideas into something a portfolio can be allocated against.

3. Funding criteria and stage gates

The decision rules, written down before the concepts exist: what qualifies as evidence at each stage, what a concept must demonstrate to take the next tranche of money, and what triggers a stop. Criteria set in advance are the only reliable defense against screening on seniority, and they are what makes a kill decision routine instead of a loss of face.

4. Portfolio allocation and sequencing

How the available capital and the available senior attention split across core, adjacent and new territory, and in what order the work is taken on. Sequencing matters as much as the split, because some bets only become affordable once an earlier one has retired a shared risk or built a shared capability. We hand over an allocation with the trade-offs named, not a wish list.

5. Governance: who decides, and who can stop it

A decision forum with the right people in it, a cadence that matches how fast evidence actually arrives, and clear authority over both funding and termination. We specify who sits in it, what they see, which decisions they can take without escalation, and how a kill decision is made and communicated so that the team involved is redeployed rather than penalized.

6. Delivery discipline: roadmap, owners and the first build

Innovation strategy and delivery are one job. The strategy ships with a roadmap that names what gets built first, what the second wave depends on, who owns each piece, and what the first build has to prove before the next tranche is released. We stay through that first build where it helps, because the gap between an agreed strategy and a working first release is where most innovation programs quietly stop.

How an innovation strategy engagement works

1. Frame. Leadership and CFO interviews, an audit of every initiative currently funded, and customer and non-customer research into the demand the company could credibly serve. The output is an honest picture of what the portfolio holds today and how much of the growth plan it is being asked to carry.
2. Architect. A small number of named platforms built out properly, each with its demand evidence, its right to win and its exclusions. Alongside them, the funding criteria and stage definitions, agreed in writing before any concept is screened against them.
3. Allocate. Capital and senior attention split across the platforms and across horizons, with the sequence set and the trade-offs named. Live initiatives are rescreened against the new criteria here, which is where work gets stopped and capital is recycled.
4. Deliver. Governance stood up with named decision rights, a roadmap with owners, and the first build underway against the evidence it has to produce. We hand over a running system rather than a document.

Why companies choose Vivaldi for innovation strategy

We start from demand rather than from the capability inventory. The question is not what this company could build, it is what customers are already trying to get done and would grant this company permission to do. That is a research job as much as a strategy job, and it is the difference between a platform that holds up under scrutiny and one that reads well in the deck and dissolves on first contact with a customer.

We write the criteria before the ideas. Most innovation work is evaluated after the fact, which is how sponsorship beats evidence. Setting the decision rules first is not a procedural nicety, it is the mechanism that makes an unpopular kill decision survivable for the person who has to make it.

We do not leave at the strategy. Our teams work with the people who will own the build, and stay through the first release where that is useful, because the handover from strategy to delivery is where the value in this work is most often lost. We are a strategy firm with innovation, brand and experience in the same practice, which means the roadmap we hand over has been pressure tested against what it will take to bring something to market, not only against whether the logic holds.

How to evaluate an innovation strategy consultant

• Will they tell you what to stop? A firm that only adds to the portfolio is selling you activity.
• Do the funding criteria get written down before any concept is screened, and are they specific enough that two people would reach the same answer?
• Does the work end at a strategy, or does it include governance, decision rights and a delivery sequence with named owners?
• Whose evidence is the demand case built on, and did they speak to people who are not already your customers?
• Who from the firm is actually in the room after the kickoff, and do they stay through the first build or hand off to a delivery team you have not met?

Innovation strategy consultancy vs innovation agency vs large management consultancy?

Related work

This page covers the portfolio and governance of innovation. If what you are looking for is growth and innovation consulting as a whole, the combined growth and innovation practice is the right place to start, and it is where the broader engagements and the case studies sit.

• Growth Strategy decides where growth will come from at company level, of which innovation is one source among several.
• Product and Service Innovation decides which products and services to create, once this page has decided which territories are funded.
• Business Model Innovation decides whether the model itself has to change, rather than what the company builds within it.
• Open Innovation covers innovating with outside parties, including partners, startups and academic networks.
• Innovation Playbook codifies the repeatable method and tooling the organization uses, after the direction and the criteria are set.
• Business Experimentation tests the assumptions a funded concept rests on, inside the gates this page defines.
• Experimentation and Ventures stands up and runs new ventures where the right answer is a separate vehicle rather than a program.

All of it sits inside our Growth Strategy and Innovation practice, part of Brand, Innovation and Experience at Vivaldi.

Innovation strategy consulting in the US and worldwide

We run this work from 10 offices on four continents, with US, European and Asian teams on the same engagement where the portfolio spans markets. That matters more in innovation than in most strategy work, because demand evidence does not travel: a need state that is well served in one market can be wide open in another, and a platform that is obvious in the home market can be the fourth-best use of capital elsewhere. Where a portfolio is global, we gather the demand evidence market by market before the allocation is set, so that regional teams are funded against what their own customers will actually pay for rather than against a plan written somewhere else.