Valen’s Agile Innovation is an entrepreneurial approach to innovation utilizing iterative agile market learning to significantly improve accuracy and time to market.
Our Philosophy
Agile market learning is critical for innovation today. It requires small, generalist teams to navigate decisions through multi-disciplinary methods. The process must be iterative and driven from disciplined insight. We help you deliver meaningful innovation with one small team who can breakdown silos and eliminate hand-offs to improve innovation results.
Agile innovation allows an organization to manage uncertainty and make strategic choices during development and prior to delivery. We do this through a series of short sprints that focus efforts to progress through development. By applying agile principals originating from software development methodologies, the testing of new ideas that drive innovation becomes attainable, efficient, and effective through iterations, or sprints, of test-and-learn scenarios. This enables an organization to gather critical, unique insight into its consumers and those insights to drive the development.
What We Do
From commercial innovation to product innovation to new business ventures, Valen’s Agile Innovation services are delivered by a team of experienced strategists with the expertise to help drive decisions and results unique to your needs using proven methods agnostic to industry or business size.
We provide services to help in a specific stage of innovation or comprehensive, end-to-end innovation development:
• Early-Stage Exploration: Foresight, Empathy, Concept or Business Model Development, Brand Strategy
• Agile Market Learning: Experience Journey Mapping, Jobs to be Done (JTBD), Positioning and Hypothesis Testing
• Agile Product Testing: Validate and Hone Concept for Product/Market Fit
• Scaling Up: Modeling, Marketing Communication/Positioning and Go-to-Market Roadmap
We also consult on building innovation capability or aligning on the innovation organization:
• Structuring or re-designing the organization to be more effective at innovation
• Improving innovation methods and tools
• Enhancing the agility and speed of the innovation process
• Innovation Strategy and Portfolio Management Approach
• Coaching and collaboration for team climate and unique thinking
Assessing The Innovation Organization
In over two decades of helping organizations improve innovation, we found that process improvement, including new tools or approach implementations, explains less than 30% of success. To explain the rest, we had to go beyond improving the process by also focusing on the People and the Environment. Good innovation needs a defined approach or process, but to help organizations derive a more efficientoutcome and improved results there’s a 3X effect in results by focusing on the: Right People, Right Process and Right Environment.
Our Services
Agile Innovation Activation
• Core Business – Agile Innovation: Incremental Product and Commercial Innovation
• Innovation Adjacencies – Brand Extension, New category or Innovation outside core
• Transformational Innovation – Breakthrough, Disruptive, Significant New Category, New Business Model or Venture
Innovation Strategy
• Innovation Assessment
• Innovation Process and Organizational Management Improvement Consulting
• Portfolio Management
• Benchmarking Studies on Best Practices: Global innovation practices, innovation process and management approaches
• Coaching Entrepreneurial and Agile Methods
Supporting Insight & Analysis
• Fusion MethodologyTM: Qualitative Sprint-based Agile Market Learning to provide meaningful insights using Empathy, Jobs to be Done (JTBD) and Design Thinking principles
• Concept Development: Concept writing, Positioning, Concept Testing and Concept Optimization
• Market Analysis: Opportunity Assessment and Market-Sizing
• Competitive Analysis: Insight into White Space, Positioning and Pricing opportunities to guide innovation
• Custom Quantitative Research for foundational and strategic insight
Featured Services
The Valen Group is a trusted outside strategic advisor to help companies deliver innovation to better compete and grow in the domestic and global marketplace. As an Innovation Strategy Consulting firm we have provided fact-based recommendations since 2000 to top global company executives. Our Innovation Consulting Services Include: