Why you should invest in innovation consulting

Today, most companies have a dedicated innovation team. Even so, the vast majority continues relying on external help to develop their businesses. In this article, we explain why innovation consulting services remain so relevant — and why you should invest in them.

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Innovation is about solving problems, reaching consistent competitive advantages to differentiate companies from their competitors, as well as several other key elements for businesses. But, since innovation methods have been around for a while, the question is: Why should companies keep investing in innovation consulting?

Read our article and find out the answer.

What is the main purpose of an innovation consultancy?

We can define the purpose of innovation as creating a solution (or enhancing an existing one) that solves a business challenge, leading the company to acquire a competitive difference in the face of competition – and ideally saving money and time.

It’s present in every industry imaginable. The range of possible solutions is vast and can involve:

• Implementation of cutting-edge technology at a company level
• Building new products, services, or features
• Formatting new business models or revenue streams
• Creating and redesigning processes, in addition to eliminating bottlenecks
• Planning your company’s next strategic steps, with an eye on the future

If you take a look at the giants of any industry, they all have an internal innovation team. But even these companies count on the help of innovation consultancies to structure, accelerate, and carry on projects for them. So what’s the purpose of hiring an innovation consultancy?

Have you ever hit a wall while working on a problem in which you couldn’t seem to find a proper solution, no matter how many hours you put into it?

The truth is that no matter how good you are at what you do, everyone is susceptible to a plateau — especially if you don’t have a structured idea-generation process to make your ideas flow.

Getting a fresh pair of eyes to take a look at a problem is sometimes all you need to find new creative paths to innovate. Innovation consulting firms are well-oiled machine of eyes that can provide your teams with proven innovation tools, techniques, and methodologies to arrive at innovative solutions.

What are the benefits of hiring an innovation consulting firm?

So, you understand what the purpose of an innovation consultancy is, but what exactly can they do for you? In a nutshell, hiring an innovation consulting firm is about accelerating your goals with expert help.

The list of advantages is extensive, so we’ve highlighted a few of the main benefits so that you can get an idea of what you’re paying for when you hire one.

Identify and fix broken processes

Most processes in companies and industries involve people, and while people do make mistakes, they’re also incredibly skilled at creating workarounds. What this means is that even the most impractical and inefficient processes end up delivering a solution in the end. 

The problem with this operational flexibility is that people and companies get used to the way things are and don’t necessarily look for more effective ways to get things done. That’s where innovation consultancies come into play. They can help find new paths through red tape and broken systems to devise a better, more efficient, and cost-effective process.

Create or enhance existing products, services, and features

Every company that creates something has an R&D department. Their job is to enhance or design new products, features, and services, but they don’t always have their fingers on the pulse.

One of MJV’s guiding principles is that you can’t get any innovation done unless you understand the company, industry, and, most importantly, the customers involved in the process in their entirety. 

Getting a consultancy to conduct in-depth research into your clients, employees, and products is a great way to lay down the groundwork for new and innovative offerings.

Test business ideas and concepts before going-to-market

You’re probably tired of hearing this statistic by now, but it’s kind of like the “measure twice, cut once” of business, and that’s that 95% of all products fail on launch. 

What this means for businesses is that going-to-market is frightening, and companies want to make sure that whatever they’re putting out there is going to float, rather than sink. 

Innovation consultancies are incredibly experienced in assisting their clients with testing and launching and have great tact when it comes to understanding customers.

Structure new business fronts and revenue models

With the information age came the consolidation of industries. Most industry giants and legacy companies nowadays do way more than what they did when they were founded. 

Companies like Apple and Amazon are already acquiring fintechs in order to provide their customers with financial services. In today’s world, it’s quite commonplace for companies to open up new business fronts and revenue streams that don’t exactly align with their areas of expertise.

Innovation consultancies operate within an incredibly diverse ecosystem of industries, helping everyone from banks and tech giants to CPG and automobile manufacturers. If anyone can help you venture forth into a new or alien industry, it’s them.

Develop plans and strategies to guide your company’s next steps

The pace of change and industry disruption has drastically increased in recent years, and that pace is set to quicken. Planning ahead can seem impossible when there’s a new technological breakthrough every year, but that doesn’t make it impossible.

Part of working with innovation is foreseeing it, and if there is anyone who can help you plan your next steps along the trail, it’s those that are at the forefront, cutting their way through the jungle vines.

Building a culture to reach innovation consistency

Give someone innovation and you feed them for a day, teach them to innovate and you feed them for a lifetime. While innovation isn’t exactly sustenance, the shoe still fits, and integrating innovation culture into your business is an excellent way to boost consistency and longevity.

The same tools and methodologies that innovation consultants use in their day-to-day life can be taught and adapted to function in every company and in any industry. It’s something we take pride in and is in no way seen as giving away trade secrets.

What innovation consulting services does MJV offer?

We’ve covered some of the main purposes of innovation consultancies, and what benefits they can offer, but how do we arrive at those benefits? We’ll walk you through just a few of the services that MJV has to offer its clients.

Business Strategy Consulting

We have a deck of various solutions available to help our clients. The first step is an in-depth immersion to understand where the corporation is at and where it needs help in order to get where they want to go. 

According to business objectives, we outline the strategy and choose our tools. Which ones we actually apply to your business will depend on what your objectives are and the insights generated from our immersion. 

The list of possible tools and methodologies is as follows:

Business Process Management

The idea behind Business Process Management is simply to take note of and map out how processes within your company work within their own specific context. This means that it takes into account the inputs that certain processes receive from other processes before it, as well as the outputs that it delivers to other processes down the line.

BPM can be used to address every aspect of your company on a macro level, but it can also be used on a micro level, taking a look at individual processes that need a helping hand. 

The concept is collaborative and encourages knowledgeable workers to share their insights and opinions on current processes. All this is done in order to identify opportunities for improvement in order to optimize workflows and procedures.

Customer Experience & User Experience

The general market consensus is that being user-driven is more critical than ever before. And with consumers becoming increasingly demanding and more aware of their options, the key differentiating factor is user experience.

In order to develop competitive and enchanting user experiences, your customers need to be at the center of all your strategies. This overarching concept needs to be disseminated through your internal culture in order to be successful, and we have a list of options to choose from when it comes to implementing that mindset:

Training

As we stated before, training your employees in the way of innovation is what we do best (and we just so happen to have a lot of experience in this field).

Acquiring new skills, mindsets, and behaviors begins with an understanding of the need for change. In order to achieve this, we have a shortlist of proven methods and activities that can help your employees reach true innovation consistency:

Convert your challenges into solution in five weeks

As you saw in this article, one of the worst mistakes companies can make when managing innovation is believing that it is a product of chance.

Most business ideas fail because they lack a strategy – which means if a company doesn’t dedicate enough attention and resources to its innovation strategy and processes, it will never achieve evergreen outcomes. This ends now.

To help our clients unlock paths to new business ideas and revenue opportunities, we’d like to introduce you to MJV’s Business Strategy Sprint, a project dynamics designed to provide you with a solution to a corporate challenge in just five weeks – carried out and supported by MJV experts with experience in several different innovation methods.

▷ If innovation culture is still spreading at your company – and you’re starting to structure an innovation process (or even finding it difficult to improve your strategy), then MJV’s Business Design Sprint can be the right entry project for you.

▷ If your company is already experienced, but hit a plateau and it feels stagnant, this may be the right opportunity to get rid of bottlenecks to unlock paths to new solutions and revenue generation – scaling your innovative potential.

In either case, click on the image below to check out our Business Design Sprint proposal — and the challenges it sets out to solve. We hope that this article has given you a better idea of how innovation consulting is still central for companies to achieve expected results.

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