Innovation Consulting: Consultant and Coach for Businesses

What is innovation consulting?

Innovation consulting brings together the services that enable an organization to become more innovative and improve its ability to create new products, services, processes, technologies or business models. Consulting brings three things that a company rarely has in-house: dedicated time, a proven method and an outside view, free from habits and power games.

The role of an innovation consultant is not to innovate in place of the client. It is to make sure they do it well, then to leave the organization the methods and reflexes to carry on alone. A successful consulting assignment is judged on two results: the initiatives that moved forward, and what the client's people are able to do at the end that they could not do before. Building that capability matters as much as any single success.

What does an innovation consultant do?

Depending on the need, an innovation consultant puts their expertise to work on one or more of these tasks:

• Assess innovation capability: practices, culture, the project portfolio, the place of innovation in the way decisions are made.
• Build the innovation roadmap: ambition, priority territories, balance between improving what exists and new bets. We describe this step on our page on defining an innovation strategy.
• Design the operating model: stages, criteria, an investment committee, performance indicators, and the operating rhythm that keeps them alive.
• Run creativity and ideation workshops with operational staff, using methods such as design thinking, jobs to be done or Creative Problem Solving.
• Coach the managers who lead initiatives, individually or as a group.
• Measure results and adjust the approach over time.

Jobs to be done: start from the customer

Many consulting firms in this field use the jobs to be done approach, popularized by Clayton Christensen. The idea is simple: customers do not buy a product, they hire it to get a job done. A commuter who buys a milkshake in the morning is hiring it to make a long drive less boring, not to enjoy a dessert. Looking at the jobs customers are trying to get done, rather than at the product itself, often reveals the real problem to solve and new ideas that a classic survey would miss.

This customer view is the starting point of most of our assignments. Before talking about ideas or technology, we look with you at what your customers face and at the jobs they would gladly hire a better solution for. This is also how we build the business case of each idea with operational teams.

The different types of innovation consulting

Innovation consulting has diversified a great deal in recent years. It brings together large consultancies and independent consultants with very different expertise, and knowing them avoids talking to the wrong people.

Strategy and innovation consulting

This is our trade: building the capability of the company to innovate, year after year. It deals with choices, organization, governance and behaviour: how to decide, how to get research, marketing and operations to cooperate, how to make every team want to propose ideas. It also covers the operating model of innovation: who does what, with which budget and which decision rights.

Innovation funding advice

Specialist firms assist companies in obtaining public funding: R&D tax relief, Innovate UK grants, European programmes such as Horizon Europe. They prepare the applications, document the eligible costs and assist the applicant during checks. This is not what we do: if you have a funding application to prepare, we will point you towards these specialists.

Technology and engineering consulting

Engineering consultancies, research and technology organizations and scientific advisers support product development, technology watch and intellectual property. Their engineering expertise is essential when the problem is technical rather than organizational.

Operational excellence and continuous improvement

Other consultancies focus on improving existing processes: quality, lead times, costs. This operational improvement is a valuable form of incremental innovation, but it is distinct from creating new offers.

Corporate venturing and open innovation

Some advisers help large companies partner with start-ups: corporate venture capital, incubators, accelerators, open innovation programmes with external partners. These approaches open the organization to new ideas, as long as the partners find a real sponsor inside the corporate structure and a clear decision path. Building such partnerships takes time: corporate partners and start-ups do not work at the same speed, and a consultant can build the bridge between them.

Innovation consultant or coach: what is the difference?

The consultant brings answers: a diagnosis, a recommendation, a method. The coach helps people find their own answers and change the way they operate. In an innovation project, both stances are useful. Consulting structures the approach; the coach enables leaders and managers to carry it, to hold firm in the face of uncertainty and to bring their team along.

We combine the two, because real change needs both. Marc Prager is an ICF certified coach (PCC) and held senior management positions for many years at Xerox, Groupe SEB and Lactalis. This double experience avoids two pitfalls: consulting that delivers a report with no follow-up, and coaching that never touches the substance.

This expertise was built over the years, in France and internationally, alongside industrial companies, service groups and research departments, in more than one industry. It comes with the professional stance of a coach: listen before recommending, and leave the final say to senior leadership. We are not a large consultancy; when an assignment calls for it, we join forces with other independent consultants whose technological or industry expertise complements ours.

Why bring in an innovation consultant?

Bringing in an outside view is justified in a few typical situations:

• your ideas do not become projects, or your projects never reach the market as new products;
• your competitors launch offers faster than you, or a technological disruption threatens your industry;
• senior leadership wants to relaunch innovation but does not know where to start;
• a reorganization, a merger or a digital transformation shakes up the way you operate;
• your people have lost the desire to propose, for lack of listening or results.

In each of these cases, an outside view helps to make the right diagnosis, set concrete objectives and put in place an approach that your teams can then lead on their own.

What outside partners bring to the business

The benefits of a consulting assignment show first in the results: initiatives that succeed faster, products and services better suited to the customer, a clear improvement in portfolio performance and in the success rate of new offers. They also show in the way people cooperate: clearer priorities, smoother links between departments, faster decisions.

• Measurable results. Shorter time to market, a rising share of revenue from new offers and from new business models, dead-end initiatives stopped earlier: the expected results are defined from the start.
• Better collective performance. Cooperation between research, marketing, operations and sales improves when everyone understands the rules of the game.
• Lasting skills. The company learns to run its own initiatives: building these skills is the best result of a successful assignment.
• Business growth. Innovation stops being the concern of a few enthusiasts and becomes a growth lever understood by the whole leadership team.

For a small business as for a large group, these results are built over time, with rigorous management of priorities and customers involved in testing from the very first stages.

Execution: from recommendation to operational results

Many innovation consulting projects fail not on the diagnosis, but on execution. A strategy that nobody carries, a process that adds meetings without changing anything, a portfolio review that never stops an idea: the risk is real, and it is the main cause of change fatigue. That is why we build execution into the assignment from the start. Each recommendation names an owner, a first step and a date; each workshop ends with choices, not just ideas. We then help you scale what works, step by step and at the right scale, because the ability to scale a good idea, without losing its success factors, matters more than a perfect plan. Change management is part of the job, and so is building operational routines: every new way of operating carries a risk of rejection, and that risk is managed with the people concerned, not around them.

How to choose an innovation consultant

Consultants are not all equal, and the best is not always the biggest. Before you bring one in, here is our advice on how to choose.

1. Fit with your need. Funding, technology, direction or human development: first check that the consultancy actually does what you need.
2. Experience on the ground. An adviser who has managed people during their own career understands your constraints of budget, deadlines and results.
3. Methods and tools. Ask how an assignment actually runs, step by step, which tools will be used and what your people will keep.
4. Transfer of skills. A good adviser makes you autonomous and develops the professional maturity of your managers; be wary of assignments that create dependency.
5. References and quality of follow-up. Ask former clients about the results obtained and about day-to-day cooperation.
6. A clear proposal. Objectives, deliverables, duration and budget should be written down in black and white before the start.

How we work as innovation consultants

We advise chief executives, leadership teams and groups of managers in Paris, Lyon, Geneva, across Europe and internationally. Every assignment follows the same path, and we work in English, French or Russian: a first conversation to understand your context, a short diagnosis, a tailored proposal, then implementation, which alternates workshops, sessions with senior leadership and coaching of key people. A final review measures the results and prepares what comes next.

Our assignments rely on concrete tools and partners, chosen for your situation: assessment of the innovation culture, creativity workshops, mapping of current initiatives, review of decision channels. For idea generation methods, see our toolkit for ideation and design thinking. Our advice stays practical: a recommendation is only worth something if your people can apply it the very next day.

We also give growing attention to responsible innovation. Sustainability, frugality and social impact have opened new avenues for many companies in recent years, as long as they are built into a new offer from the design stage. Handled well, sustainability becomes a driver of business model innovation rather than one more constraint, and we help sustainability and innovation leaders move forward together, so that the transformation serves both.

FAQ

This article was written by Marc Prager.