Our Digital Innovators work in various industries and organisations. During one of our innovation projects, we worked at a renowned cosmetics company in the United Kingdom for three months. An independent innovation team, consisting of employees and external professionals, was set up to tackle the problem at hand.

Want to know more? Contact Jasper Brand via jasper.​brand@​thetalentinstitute.​nl or +31610960766

The challenge at hand

Our client struggled with identifying and validating the needs and pains of their customers and translating these insights into their products. To make it more complicated, they relied on intermediaries to promote and sell their products which made it hard to gain direct feedback from end-users. We joined their innovation team with the goal to help them gain insights into their customer needs and translate these into their products.

Our approach

We implemented and executed a clearly structured process to tackle the challenge at hand: Scoping, Customer Discovery, Solution Ideation and Solution Validation.

In the first week, we made sure the team decided on the scope of the project. Once the scope was clear, we collected all information available already and pinpointed the areas unknown to the team to prepare the Customer Discovery phase. We organised several streams of interviews which provided the team with massive amounts of information, many of which were newly discovered insights. Out of these insights we distilled the customer’ Jobs to be Done, Pains and Gains for both the Supply and Demand-side. Next, we validated our insight online on a larger scale. Based on both the qualitative and quantitative insights the team created five personas for the demand side and three personas for the supply side of their business model.

Next up was the solution ideation and validation phase. More than 40 solutions were ideated and after a careful evaluation, the project resulted in 5 ideas that were ready for experimentation and testing with real customers — both online and offline.

The Results

• Five clearly identified personas, based on qualitative customer insights and quantitative validation (supply)

• Three clearly identified personas, based on qualitative customer insights and quantitative validation (demand)

• Validated value proposition canvas for the target solutions
• Business Model Canvas per solution with a test plan
• Validated more than 5 potential solutions