Innovation is at the heart of every business and we work with clients from across all industries on creating successful innovation - from banks to restaurant chains to retailers.
When it works well revenues grow, costs can shrink, and market share can be captured. It's no secret that innovation is as hard as it is important though. You can’t just ask customers what they will want in the future, and you can’t innovate well without failing once or twice along the way.
Designing a better future for our clients' businesses usually comes from a mix of the right insight, a focus on value and a clear vision for something that cannot easily be copied by the competition. Economics has a lot to offer in this context, from defining the value of a new product, to creating incentives for customers to buy into it. And beyond the numbers, this journey is also about embracing a test and learn approach that is robust and allows businesses to learn and adapt.
We use our economic toolkit to support clients to build, test, iterate and implement innovation. Using five key questions we pinpoint the underlying economics behind specific innovation needs. We then help our clients navigate the uncertainty of customer behaviour, competitive threats and changing context.
This approach helps to innovate faster, better and in areas that create more value. And it’s flexible too: able to support individual product innovations as well as transforming how innovation works from the ground up.
To get in touch with someone from the team please email innovation@frontier-econmics.com.
How to be better at innovation: the 5 questions we ask our clients
We’ve developed five questions that we ask all clients who want to innovate. These questions allow us to get to the underlying economics behind a business’s innovation needs, and demonstrate how they affect innovation decisions at all levels.
Discover moreFrontier’s flexible approach helps our clients innovate faster, better and in areas that create most impact for them. Our aim is not to take over the innovation process for our clients, but help them remove the friction points that hinder successful innovation.
Providing clarity
Navigating uncertainty
Innovation is ultimately about creating value for a business. This means that identifying where value might be and sizing its potential in a robust, timely manner is fundamental to successful innovation. Doing this well is a lot easier said than done, and many businesses struggle with it. For example, customer insight might be asking the wrong questions, quantitative models might be too focussed on short term pay-back and decisions might be biased towards quick wins. We support our clients by identifying the levers to enable evidence-based thinking right through the innovation process. We help them to identify value pools and assess the size of the prize, tweaking our approach to accommodate different levels of uncertainty based on the innovation time horizon.
Innovation is always uncertain, and there is risk linked to any change a business makes. For example, a different decision process is usually required to place bets on uncertain, long-term innovations versus signing off incremental improvements to a proposition. Some businesses find this tricky to navigate and try to push different types of investment decisions through the same static processes. This can slow down decision-making and risks missing out on opportunities. We support our clients in building the evidence base and the right framework for decision-making across all types of innovations - from small tweaks to big bets.
Incentives are fundamental to successful innovation. It can be easy to create enthusiasm for a new proposition in the internal team at first. But it is usually much harder to design incentives in a way that genuinely motivates the right behaviours in the long term - from avoiding conflicts between competing business units to personal objectives of executives. And for customer-facing innovation to be successful, incentivising customer behaviours efficiently is key. We use a mix of economic modelling, behavioural economics and pragmatism around real business needs to support our clients to navigate this space effectively.
Team thoughts
Innovation can look very different across sectors, businesses and industries and is about much more than just brand new, shiny products or services.
Content on Helping our clients create future value
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