Consumer portfolio, innovation, and design

Driving profitable growth at pace through innovation

What we do

Portfolio and innovation strategy

We partner with clients to identify distinctive opportunity spaces, shape winning concepts, and accelerate the path to launch supported by distinctive insights, design, and business-building capabilities.

Digitally enabled innovation models

We build distinctive operating models that accelerate the path to market and increase success, using solutions to understand consumer sentiment (PinPoint, SocialSense); rapidly identify formulation and packaging opportunities (FoodIQ, PackIQ); and manage the portfolio (Project Portfolio Navigator, Koru).

Brand design to value

We build multi-year product pipelines for leading brands that include innovation, cost savings, and renovation improvements. We combine the multiple product goals of growth, cost savings and sustainability, removing silos and driving a step change in results.

Examples of our work

Accelerating time to market and improving gross margins

Revitalized growth for a global durables player, driving a comprehensive brand design-to-value program across critical global product lines, developing a product roadmap and creating clear design targets to disentangle overlapping product lines. These efforts accelerated time to market by 40% and drove a 15% improvement to gross margins.

Resetting an innovation model and portfolio

Partnered with a global CPG player to reset the innovation model and portfolio, using Innovation Quotient to diagnose the innovation system and prioritize interventions. Using our proprietary incrementality analytics, we reset the innovation portfolio to reduce the pipeline by 50%. We also redesigned the operating-to-drive innovation across business units and functions, freeing up 50% of innovation resources to reallocate to higher potential initiatives.

Redesigning an innovation strategy and operating model

Worked with a global CPG player to build a consumer obsessed growth portfolio by redesigning their innovation strategy and operating model using Innovation Quotient to identify critical interventions. Together, we built programs for critical growth capabilities including disruptive innovation, design-to-value, and marketing excellence, building a roadmap for $100M+ of annual incremental EBITDA creation.

Our people

Stacey Haas

Partner, Detroit

Stacey helps clients drive profitable growth, with a focus on portfolio strategy, innovation, and design-to-deliver above-market growth.

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Rob Loughlin

Partner, Boston

Rob helps clients drive profitable growth and innovation through brand and product portfolios, supplier management, and ecosystem development. He co-leads the firm’s global work on portfolio, innovation, design, and digitally enabled innovation.

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Jon McClain

Partner, Chicago

Jon helps clients drive profitable, above-market growth with a focus on portfolio strategy, innovation, and new business building.

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Erik Roth

Senior Partner, Stamford

Erik is one of the firm’s foremost experts on matters related to innovation, including innovation strategy, new-product development, business-model creation, open innovation, culture change, and R&D management.

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