Future-proofing innovation portfolio strategy

One of the leading global wine and spirits companies in the world asked Skarbek to support them in revisiting and future-proofing their innovation portfolio strategy.

Their ambition was to ensure relevance of focus for their innovation incubation structure, inform fiscal year budget processes with a clear set of priorities, and accelerate growth through design and delivery of game-changing innovation platforms, ultimately driving new growth ahead of competition.

The needs

Our client operates in a very dynamic industry, where traditional market innovation, while enabling short term growth goals, is not sufficient anymore to grow competitively in the face of category and consumer shifts. With a fast-changing regulatory context, increasing sustainability pressures and shifting consumer behaviours and needs, our client was increasingly aware of the need to ramp-up the focus on anticipating the future and preparing for possible scenarios.

To that intent, our client first asked for Skarbek’s help in bringing to life the context in which they uniquely operated. The aim was to characterize and prioritize challenges and opportunities essential to consider in designing a potent innovation portfolio strategy. Then, for Skarbek to lead an ‘insights to action’ process that would link priority innovation spaces to a clear set of projects and actions for the team to prioritize looking forward.

What we did

We partnered with our client to lead a structured 3-phase process involving high-intensity physical and digital collaborative workshops

Shaping Future-Focused Opportunity Landscapes

Explore the unique context in which our client operates through characterizing possible futures and opportunity spaces. This involved connecting cross-functional internal knowledge with external insights to bring to life the best view of all factors that would inform and affect our client’s future (trends, competition, sustainability scenarios, brand growth strategies, regulatory shifts, etc.)

Defining Strategic Innovation Priorities

Refine hypotheses and converge onto highly-informed focused strategic innovation opportunity areas, ready to engage innovation teams, brands and business leaders

Building the Innovation Portfolio

Lead the translation from ‘innovation opportunity spaces’ into strategic technology platform choices, ultimately creating an innovation portfolio capturing current activities and priority activation spaces for new technology platform projects

"From complex context to CEO-backed priorities, Skarbek translated insight into a focused, actionable innovation portfolio."

The results

The Skarbek-led programme enabled our client to:

For the first time, effectively capture and bring to life the fast-evolving complex context in which they operate, compiling the best of internal knowledge, and complementing it with best-in-class external thinking and perspectives
Make highly informed choices and synthesize outcomes into a ready-to-share set of materials capturing future-focused priority innovation opportunity spaces for the company, supported by unique consumer and market insights
Translate innovation opportunity spaces into a specific set of high-potential technology innovation opportunities
Ignite the innovation community across brand companies with an informed and aligned innovation portfolio addressing company-level opportunities and anticipating possible future consumer and market shifts
Engage the cross-functional innovation community and leadership team and ultimately align around ONE set of high-value choices

Skarbek-enabled outcomes were effectively shared and aligned with company Brand CEOs, receiving very positive feedback. Outcomes informed the activation of a focused set of high-value technology.

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