A GUIDE TO SUCCESSFUL INNOVATION:

From Ideation to
Validation
Contents

• 4 types of innovation you need to know

• Brainstorming exercises to help you get started

• How to plan an effective idea screening study (in 3 steps)

• The secret to successful idea screening

2 | A Guide to Successful Innovation: From Ideation to Validation

4 types of innovation
you need to know

Grouping your ideas based on their

strategic objective will help you set
the right performance metrics for
each innovation.

According to McKinsey, every

innovation can play one of four
roles in your growth strategy.
 1. Line Extension
Goal: Expand on your existing
product, message, or design.
Example: Extend your existing
brand and introduce new
flavors, formats, sizes, or
package designs
3. Disruptive
Innovation
Goal: Disrupt your space and/or
create a new category.
Example: Target a new audience,
solve unmet needs, create new
business models.
4 | A Guide to Successful Innovation: From Ideation to Validation
2. Innovation Expansion
Goal: Differentiate yourself from
the competition and innovate
within your market.
Example: Launch a new product
with unique features to serve
consumers more effectively
4. Renovation
Goal: Enhance your product
market fit and value proposition.
Example: Improve features,
product positioning, packaging,
and go-to-market strategy.
 1. Line Extension 2. Innovation Expansion
Investment: Investment:
Impact: Impact:
Time: 1 month Time: 3 months

3. Disruptive Innovation 4. Renovation

Investment: Investment:
Impact: Impact:
Time: 6 months Time: 2-3 months

5 | A Guide to Successful Innovation: From Ideation to Validation Source: McKinsey, 2020.

Brainstorming
exercises to
help you get
started
So, you’ve determined the
objective of your innovation work.
Now it’s time to bring fresh and
exciting ideas to the table.

Here are 3 brainstorming

exercises to practice with
your team…
 S.C.A.M.P.E.R
This method can quickly get you thinking outside of the box. Every step of S.C.A.M.P.E.R.
stands for an activity that a team can do to find innovative solutions.

Substitute come up with alternative solutions to the idea

Combine think how ideas can be merged

Adapt adjust or tweak ideas

Modify, maximize and minimize can the idea’s elements be adjusted in size?

Put to another use change the context in which the idea exists

Eliminate remove an element to make the idea better

Reverse & rearrange change the context in which the idea exists

7 | A Guide to Successful Innovation: From Ideation to Validation

 Framestorming
To practice this technique, start by posing a challenge,
and ask the question…

How Might We

Solution-oriented Optimistic Collaborative

8 | A Guide to Successful Innovation: From Ideation to Validation

 AI Idea Generation
Artificial intelligence is perfect for brainstorming ideas and helps to combine different data
sets. AI can understand trends and patterns from the internet to create recommendations
for potential innovations.

Dipping sauce
Best car features
ideas

New seasonal Premium pizza

candles toppings

Tip: Using AI to generate ideas can help you eliminate bias. AI is trained on swaths of data from various
sources to recommend potential innovations and produce unique ideas faster than humans.

9 | A Guide to Successful Innovation: From Ideation to Validation

How to plan an effective
idea screening study
(in 3 steps)
Once you have determined your innovation
goals and generated some ideas, you have
to begin prioritizing the best ones. That’s
where idea screening comes in.
 1
Define your goals
Ask yourself: what do you want to achieve with this study and why?

Conduct competitive
Discover user needs
analysis

Determine strategic fit Find out purchase intent

Uncover market potential Measure product recall

11 | A Guide to Successful Innovation: From Ideation to Validation

 2
Develop hypotheses
Based on your audience personas and
historical product data, come up with a few
critical assumptions that you can validate
through the research.

Testing your concept ideas against existing

products or offers in the market is a great
way to benchmark the actual potential of
your new idea or ideas.

12 | A Guide to Successful Innovation: From Ideation to Validation

 3 Text
A quick and convenient option to share
concepts, messages, package claims, or
Choose your format product features.

Consider which format is the best

to present your ideas depending
on the goals of your survey.

Images
Photos work well when
testing branding, benefits,
and packaging because
they can illustrate your idea
more clearly.

Video
Great when you have a story to tell;
videos are more engaging than text
and images.

13 | A Guide to Successful Innovation: From Ideation to Validation

The secret to
successful idea
screening
...is having access to data that
you can trust.
 The Secret
If companies have access to data they can trust, it reduces the risk of failure and optimizes product
development, saving time and money.

When combined with real sales data, idea screening can reveal which innovations have the highest
potential for success in-market - before they’re launched.

of decision makers of businesses report

23% trust their data
83% a lack of data

of businesses report of decision makers

82% wasting money due to 9% are satisfied with their
poor data quality data quality

15 | A Guide to Successful Innovation: From Ideation to Validation

 Test ideas in a cost-effective, clever way
Research tools like Upsiide can eliminate the risk of poor data quality and give you confidence in your
decisions. Visualizing your ideas can also illustrate the connections between them and help you understand
which innovation is worth pursuing.

When testing new ideas, you need to see how they Dashboards can help you uncover winners, losers, niche
stack up against the competition and prioritize those performers, and those ideas that need a bit of finessing.
with the most in-market potential.

16 | A Guide to Successful Innovation: From Ideation to Validation

Upsiide is an innovation insights platform that allows researchers
and marketers to test ideas, concepts, and communications in
a fast, cost-effective, and clever way. Because of our unique We’ve saved money,
approach to screening ideas, Upsiide is able to predict the a lot of money.
in-market potential of whatever it is you’re testing. Powerful
Before Upsiide, if
reporting and interactive dashboards mean you’ll be able to make
we wanted to test
strategic decisions – both big and small – in a flash.
30 ideas with a
traditional agency
partner, we would
spend tens of
Dig Insights is a tech-enabled insight and strategy consultancy
thousands of dollars.
that’s on a mission to help insights teams answer the question,
‘what next?’. Dig empowers its team of researchers, analysts,
Devon Lawrence,
data scientists, and strategists with internally developed
Marketing Manager
technology and proprietary analytical tools to unlock consumer
opportunities for clients and help drive growth.
Upsiide is Dig’s proprietary SaaS research platform,
purpose-built to help clients run research at each stage of the
innovation lifecycle.

upsiide.com/contact info@upsiide.com linkedin.com/company/upsiide