Innovation Strategy Consulting
Where Innovation Becomes a Science80+% of innovation initiatives fail.
Strategyn’s clients have a 86% success rate
30 minutes with a senior Strategyn consultant. No pitch — an honest read on whether ODI fits your challenge.
You’re Probably Here For One of These Reasons
Reason 1
A product launch underperformed — and you’re not sure why.
You shipped something well-built. The market didn’t respond. The post-mortem said “insufficient market fit” without telling you how to avoid it next time.
Reason 2
Your pipeline is full of incremental ideas.
Your team is generating ideas, but nothing breaks through. The board wants growth, not iteration. You need a way to find genuinely underserved opportunities — not a better version of what you already have.
Reason 3
You’re under pressure to make R&D spend defensible.
Leadership wants evidence your innovation investment is pointed at the right targets. You need a methodology that produces data, not just frameworks — something you can stand behind in a budget review.
Reason 4
You’re entering a new market and need more than a hypothesis.
The opportunity looks real. But before committing capital, you need to know — with confidence — which customer outcomes are underserved and which strategy gives you the best entry point.
What Is Innovation Strategy Consulting?
Innovation strategy consulting helps organizations determine which markets to compete in, which customer needs are underserved, and how to build products that reliably win. It replaces gut-feel ideation with a structured, evidence-based process — one repeatable across product lines, business units, and market cycles.The industry baseline for new product success is 17%. Strategyn’s ODI process has achieved 86% across 30 years of client engagements. The difference is methodology — not talent, not budget, not luck.
Innovation Fails When It’s Treated as an Art
When you start with ideas, you’re guessing. When you iterate, you’re refining a guess. The whole process depends on luck — on whether your initial hypotheses happened to point at a real customer need. Most of the time, they don’t.
This is why 83% of innovation initiatives fail. Not because teams can’t execute. Because the starting point was random. Iteration doesn’t fix a wrong starting point — it just makes you faster at the wrong thing.
A scientific approach to innovation works differently. It starts with a complete, quantified map of what customers need. It identifies, with statistical precision, which of those needs are unmet. And it builds strategy around that data — before a single idea is generated. There’s no guesswork to iterate away from because the target is known from the start.
The ODI Process: How Strategyn Makes Innovation a Science
Tony Ulwick, the pioneer of Jobs-to-be-Done Theory, built ODI on a single insight: customers don’t buy products. They hire them to get a job done. Once you know the job — and can quantify exactly which steps in that job are underserved — innovation stops being a creative exercise and becomes a targeted, data-driven process.
The result: a five-step process that tells you precisely where the market opportunity is before you invest a dollar in development.
Step 01
Define your market around the customer’s job-to-be-done
We define your market by what customers are trying to accomplish — not your product, technology, or vertical. A job-defined market is stable over time, solution-independent, and gives your team a precise focal point for long-term value creation.
Learn more →Step 02
Uncover the customer’s desired outcomes
Using leading qualitative methods, we uncover the 100+ outcome statements customers use to measure successful execution of the job. Desired outcomes are measurable, unambiguous, solution-independent, and stable over time.
Learn more →Step 03
Determine which outcomes are unmet
Statistically valid quantitative research applies the Opportunity Algorithm™ to score every outcome. The Opportunity Landscape™ reveals which outcomes are underserved (innovation targets) and which are overserved (cost-reduction targets).
Learn more →Step 04
Segment the market around unmet outcomes
ODI segments by unmet outcomes — revealing groups of customers who struggle in the same way, for the same reasons. Outcome-Based Segmentation™ uncovers hidden segments invisible to conventional research, and sizes each one.
Learn more →Step 05
Define the winning innovation strategy
With quantified opportunities and segments in hand, we determine which strategy — differentiated, dominant, disruptive, discreet, or sustaining — gives you the best path to market leadership. Derived from data, not intuition.
Learn more →What to Expect from Our Innovation Consulting Engagements
Discovery and Scoping
We align on the core job-to-be-done and the market ecosystem — who the job executors are, who the purchase decision makers are, and where innovation opportunities are most likely to exist.Qualitative Research
Deep customer interviews structured around the Universal Job Map™ to build a complete needs framework for your market.Quantitative Research
A statistically valid survey that scores the importance and satisfaction of every desired outcome. Sample sizes are designed for segmentation confidence, not just directional data.Opportunity-Based Segmentation
Using Outcome-Based Segmentation™, we identify groups of customers with uniquely different unmet needs — defined by what people are struggling to get done, which means they hold real strategic and commercial value.Strategy and Ideation
We translate the data into a clear innovation strategy and run structured ideation sessions using Outcome-Driven Ideation™ to conceptualize solutions that address the highest-value opportunities.Deliverables
An Opportunity Landscape, segmentation report, innovation strategy recommendation, and executive-ready presentation. Many clients also engage Strategyn to build internal ODI capability — making the methodology a repeatable process your team owns, not a one-time external study.
Tony Ulwick — Founder, Strategyn
Tony is the pioneer of Jobs-to-be-Done Theory and the inventor of Outcome-Driven Innovation® — the process that transforms innovation from an art to a science. Published in Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review, he is the author of What Customers Want and Jobs to Be Done: Theory to Practice.
I call him the Deming of Innovation because, more than anyone else, Tony has turned innovation into a science.
— Philip Kotler, Professor Emeritus of Marketing, Kellogg School of Management
What to Expect from Our Innovation Consulting Engagements
Only 17% of new product launches succeed. Strategyn’s ODI-based approach achieves an 86% success rate.
Medical Device
Rick Faleschini, VP Marketing, Cordis
Technology
+200M
Ben Allen, CEO, Kroll
Enterprise Software
Dave Wascha, Director
A 30-minute call with a senior Strategyn consultant. You’ll leave with a clear read on whether your innovation challenge is one ODI can solve — and if so, what a focused engagement would look like. No pitch.
10 minutes. Get a clear read on where your current innovation process is leaving growth on the table.
Is Strategyn the Right Innovation Consulting Partner for You?
They are usually at a decision point. A product line not growing the way it should. A pipeline generating incremental ideas when the board wants breakthrough growth. A market entry that needs evidence before capital is committed.
What they all have in common is a recognition that treating innovation as an art form — generating ideas, testing instincts, iterating toward product-market fit — has stopped working. They want a repeatable, evidence-based process that produces predictable outcomes. That is what ODI delivers.
You come out of an engagement knowing — with statistical confidence — which outcomes are underserved, which segments are highest-value, and which strategy gives you the clearest path forward. The guesswork is replaced by data. The art becomes a science.
The strategy call is 30 minutes with a senior Strategyn consultant. No pitch — an honest conversation about whether this approach fits your situation.
FAQ: Innovation Strategy Consulting
Ready to Turn Your Innovation Process Into a Science?
Not ready for a call? The Innovation Assessment takes 10 minutes and shows you exactly where your current approach is leaving growth on the table — and what a more disciplined, science-based process would change.