Consumer portfolio, innovation, and design

Driving profitable growth at pace through innovation

Despite identifying it as their top lever for growth, many consumer companies find it challenging to get meaningful value from innovation. We work with clients to rethink innovation and R&D to deliver significant topline growth and margin. With the consumer at the center, we shape big ideas, drive speed and effectiveness, and build lasting capabilities to deliver exceptional value for our clients.

What we do

Portfolio and innovation strategy

We partner with clients to identify distinctive opportunity spaces, shape winning concepts, and accelerate the path to launch supported by distinctive insights, design, and business-building capabilities.

Digitally enabled innovation models

We build distinctive operating models that accelerate the path to market and increase success, using solutions to understand consumer sentiment (PinPoint, SocialSense); rapidly identify formulation and packaging opportunities (FoodIQ, PackIQ); and manage the portfolio (Project Portfolio Navigator, Koru).

Brand design to value

We build multi-year product pipelines for leading brands that include innovation, cost savings, and renovation improvements. We combine the multiple product goals of growth, cost savings and sustainability, removing silos and driving a step change in results.

Examples of our work

Accelerating time to market and improving gross margins

Revitalized growth for a global durables player, driving a comprehensive brand design-to-value program across critical global product lines, developing a product roadmap and creating clear design targets to disentangle overlapping product lines. These efforts accelerated time to market by 40% and drove a 15% improvement to gross margins.

Resetting an innovation model and portfolio

Partnered with a global CPG player to reset the innovation model and portfolio, using Innovation Quotient to diagnose the innovation system and prioritize interventions. Using our proprietary incrementality analytics, we reset the innovation portfolio to reduce the pipeline by 50%. We also redesigned the operating-to-drive innovation across business units and functions, freeing up 50% of innovation resources to reallocate to higher potential initiatives.

Redesigning an innovation strategy and operating model

Worked with a global CPG player to build a consumer obsessed growth portfolio by redesigning their innovation strategy and operating model using Innovation Quotient to identify critical interventions. Together, we built programs for critical growth capabilities including disruptive innovation, design-to-value, and marketing excellence, building a roadmap for $100M+ of annual incremental EBITDA creation.

Our people

Stacey Haas

Partner, Detroit

Stacey helps clients drive profitable growth, with a focus on portfolio strategy, innovation, and design-to-deliver above-market growth.

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Rob Loughlin

Partner, Boston

Rob helps clients drive profitable growth and innovation through brand and product portfolios, supplier management, and ecosystem development. He co-leads the firm’s global work on portfolio, innovation, design, and digitally enabled innovation.

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Jon McClain

Partner, Chicago

Jon helps clients drive profitable, above-market growth with a focus on portfolio strategy, innovation, and new business building.

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Erik Roth

Senior Partner, Stamford

Erik is one of the firm’s foremost experts on matters related to innovation, including innovation strategy, new-product development, business-model creation, open innovation, culture change, and R&D management.

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Featured capabilities

To understand your company’s performance in innovation:

Innovation Quotient – Consumer-tailored innovation diagnostic that assesses company performance versus a database of 7,000+ companies based on McKinsey’s eight essentials of innovation

Identify and prioritize innovation opportunities:

PinPoint – Digital tool that rapidly identifies product growth drivers using web scraping, natural language processing, and advanced analytics of aggregated consumer data
Social Sense – At-scale social sensing tool to rapidly glean brand and product insights to guide innovation and renovation activities
Growth Maps – Machine-learning driven segmentation of the market used to understand current positioning and identify and prioritize growth space
Innovation Incrementality – Analytics leveraging point of sale data to both predict and analyze post-launch the true incrementality of an innovation
Project Portfolio Navigator – Proprietary advanced analytics optimization engine used to visualize and prioritize a portfolio of projects for rapid decision-making

Developing new products:

Culinary Excellence Center – Suite of product capabilities to support innovation and renovation for food companies including clean sheeting, teardowns, sensory testing, and “kitchen” lab space
FoodIQ – AI-driven ingredient reformulation that can optimize for cost and sustainability
PackIQ – Digital tool and database of thousands of types of packaging to automatically identify areas to improve cost structure through packaging redesign
R&D Excellence – Suite of tools and approaches to assess R&D organizations, build winning strategies, and optimize resource deployment
Innovation Garage – Approach to collaboratively build new product ideas while also shifting the client’s innovation operating model
Koru – Digital asset that helps de-risk and build conviction in new ventures, businesses and products by uncovering, quantifying, and prioritizing underlying assumptions