Product innovation research that tells you which ideas deserve the budget.

Most innovation work runs between six and twelve weeks, though every project is scoped on its own terms. A single concept test moves faster than a category creation programme with fieldwork across several markets. We study the specific question first, then give you a timeline alongside the quote, and that’s the timeline we work to. If you have a stage gate, a launch window or a board date, it shapes the plan from the start rather than turning up as a problem halfway through.

Every quote is built for the project, because the variables move a great deal. It depends on how many techniques the question needs, who we have to reach and how hard they are to recruit, whether that means consumers, category buyers, B2B decision makers or niche experts, how many concepts, how many markets, how deep the analysis goes, how urgent it is, and what you need in your hands at the end. A quick read on one concept and a full innovation programme from idea to shelf are different projects with very different numbers. Most of our projects sit in the six-figure range. We scope after a proper conversation about the decision you’re making, and you get a fixed price and a timeline before any work begins.

We build on what you already have rather than starting from zero. Your tests, your data and your team are a useful starting point. We use them, then design the techniques the question actually needs to fill in what’s missing. A concept test that tells you people like the idea and research solid enough to commit a launch budget to are different things, and the distance between them is where expensive product mistakes tend to happen. Closing that distance is the work: evidence you can act on with confidence, on the questions that decide what to build, who to build it for, and how it earns its place in the market.

In practice the idea changes far more often than the decision does. The need is usually real, and what needs reworking is the framing, the audience, the positioning, the packaging, the price or the story you tell around it. The version drawn up in the room is rarely the version people actually reach for, and that’s the useful part of the answer. When the evidence does point away from an idea as drafted, your team reshapes it before the budget goes out instead of after. Category creation and packaging often turn on exactly this: the same product, read by a different buyer or framed against a different reference, stops being a hard sell and starts being obvious. That’s a good outcome, bought early and cheaply.

Earlier than most teams expect. You don’t need a finished product or even a prototype to get a real reading. An idea written in a single sentence is enough to start, because what we’re testing isn’t the artefact, it’s the need underneath it and how people already solve it today. Testing early is where the cheap learning lives: it’s far less costly to reshape a concept while it’s still a paragraph than to discover the problem after tooling, packaging and a launch plan are already paid for. We match the technique to how formed the idea is, from raw framing sessions to full concept work, so the research meets the idea where it actually is.

Because a concept test is easy to pass and easy to misread. Ask people whether they like an idea and most will say yes, partly out of politeness and partly because they’re answering about the person they would like to be, not the one who actually shops. The gap between what people say and what they do is where launches can fail, and reading it is the whole point of the work. We look at stated interest against real behaviour, at what people claim they want against what they already pay for and switch to, so the green light you get is one you can actually build on rather than one that evaporates at the shelf.

Both, and the connection between them is what the firm is built on. We call it insight-led strategic intelligence because research earns its cost when it makes the decision sound. A real understanding of the person, the context and the moment is what separates a product that holds up from one that tested well and then stalled. So you get the evidence and what to do with it: what to build and what to leave out, who to build it for, how to frame and package it, and what to charge. The point of all of it is that your company loses less time and money building the wrong thing.

Up to a working prototype or beta. For apps, websites and digital tools, we build a version people can actually use, test it with them round after round and hand over the one that holds up, with the evidence behind every change. Your team, or the development partner you choose, builds the product that goes to market, starting from a version that’s already been proven with real users.

Abdo López and Norah Walsh lead every project in person, from the framing session to the final reading, and everyone working alongside them is senior, with more than a decade in the field. Around that core we build the team for the project. The right specialist for a food and drink launch isn’t the right specialist for a fintech feature, and the right partner for fieldwork in Mexico isn’t the right one for Singapore, so we select the experts, the partners and the technology that fit the question, the technique, the country and the industry. There’s no handover to a junior once the contract is signed, and that’s the main reason we stay small.