The Valen Group Innovation Consulting Services Group focuses on innovation strategy, front-end innovation, new product development support and consumer research insight methods. We advise clients on how to increase the probability of success in innovation from our experience with global 1000 and high-growth entrepreneurial companies. We have experience in developing the next new product or service to fill a growth pipeline need or engaging in transformational innovation developing new business models or new ventures for step-change growth.

Front-End Innovation
Even the best prepared new ideas launched can fail because there are so many variables to consider. Failure typically falls into one of three major issues:

• Missing the customer need
• Under-resourcing execution
• Not anticipating competitor or market reaction

The goal of our front-end innovation process is to increase the probability of success by solving these issues. For more than a decade we have practiced and refined our approach to front-end innovation. It works because of methods used such as iteration to gain feedback, which allows for adjustments prior to spending the significant investment necessary in development and launch, and generating ideas through insight.

Our front-end innovation process outlines strategy, insight and innovation techniques to discover unmet needs, identify a unique and differentiated market position and explore strategic issues such as competitor reaction.

The process phases are:
I. Inspiration – Find project driver and inspiration
II. Discovery – Uncover consumer insight and unmet needs
III. Conceptualization – Develop the right product benefit, positioning & advantage strategy
IV. Validation – Test and adjust concept to ensure a winning solution that is worth significant go-to-market investment

Read Front End Innovation Should Emulate an Entrepreneur's Journey, a brief that outlines our philosophy and more details behind this approach.

Innovation Assessment
When innovation success is limited or leaders are seeking bolder or higher ROI innovation, typically there are changes communicated in the form of incentives, directives and resources allocated to innovation. Amount of resources, many times, isn't the problem. It could be the innovation culture (e.g. team environment). Quickly assessing the innovativeness of the organization is a good bellwether of how innovation efforts will go over the next year. However, leaders do not have an objective method to assess the innovativeness of their organizations and innovation teams. Our innovation assessment, compares your organization to innovative companies on factors validated for innovation. By measuring where your organization or teams are today, you have a baseline to provide guidance if innovation program investments are helping. We provide an easy innovation survey instrument and assessment tools for periodic feedback on what is working and where effort should be focused for improvement. More about our innovation improvement services can be found at Organizational Management of Innovation.

Good Innovation Begins with Clear Growth Strategy
Good growth strategy is a critical pre-cursor to good front-end innovation because it sets the direction and focus. Good strategy allows management to make the commitment to spend the resources necessary for success in innovation when the time comes to execute. The Valen Group is uniquely suited to provide the linkage to growth strategy and front-end innovation and methods necessary for companies to sustain growth. See Growth Strategy.