Creating Product Platforms for Agribusiness

Client: An international food company

Situation: A vertically integrated agribusiness with major consumer brands was losing market share in a mature category. Its core business was requiring an increasing amount of energy, drawing resources away from its once-robust innovation system. The company needed to define competitively insulated growth opportunities that targeted new consumers. Ideally, it needed an opportunity that could revitalize its existing product lines and redefine its category.

Strategy: Establish a front-end innovation process based on best-of-class benchmarking. Organize a dedicated, cross-functional innovation team, including internal and external participants for a broader perspective. Charge the team with developing a portfolio of new product concepts, ranging from close-in derivatives to platform-level opportunities.

Tactics: Using the framework of Innovare’s TriCept process, team members developed insights on evolving science and technology, new consumer needs, and market trends, then used those insights as input for concept development.

In a Tech Explorer workshop, the team covered advances in agriculture, biotechnology, nutrition and health, consumer psychology, food processing, and packaging. A consumer exploratory defined the needs of various age groups in a range of product use occasions. The trend exploratory covered leading research on buying patterns, lifestyle changes and evolving attitudes towards health and nutrition.

From the discovered insights, the team created a portfolio of validated product concepts, from close-in product extensions to platform level innovations ready for phase review chartering. Once a new platform concept passed phase one hurdles a core platform development team was put in place, led by a project champion with executive sponsorship.

Result: The company populated their product development pipeline and introduced their first category-defining new product platform, which generated $100 million in revenues in its first 18 months without cannibalizing the $600 million core business.

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