North America
The NPW Innovation Tree
We use The Innovation Tree to identify likely future innovation territory, providing focus for the effort and a roadmap to sustainable growth.
Our unique approach to innovation is both consumer and future focused. Our processes include the NPW Innovation Tree®, our predictive model that helps us see future opportunity space...areas where innovation is most likely to be fruitful, ownable, and have a high potential for success.
We ground our predictions in analytical rigor, logic, consumer insight, and a deep understanding of innovation itself to help identify these promising avenues.
The Evolution of Innovation
Our extensive work in tracking and analyzing consumer and product trends over 30 years has resulted in a deep understanding of how innovation evolves over time. Our work has revealed:
- Patterns of innovation within categories
- Where a given category is in its evolutionary cycle
- Predicable ways in which consumer needs (and benefits) tend to evolve
Once a fundamental picture emerges, The Innovation Tree models the progression of innovation in numerous categories (core and ancillary), providing some key insights:
- Category specific innovation patterns and leading edge "markers" of innovation
- Areas of "innovation energy" or "tipping points", around which we may gain insight into unarticulated consumers needs
- Ways that consumer needs might successfully be dimensionalized in the future
This potent tool allows us to then look to the future and predict viable innovation paths, enabling clients to identify likely future "benefit space" that innovation could successfully address. The process results in strategic platforms – with a much tighter definition of space to explore for innovation than any past method.