Evolving product offerings that address the drive towards sustainability

Our client asked:

‘How should we evolve our product offerings to address the drive for sustainability in our market?’

Our client recognised that its customers were under pressure to adopt significantly more sustainable practices – a fact that would likely change the requirements of the product they sold. Although unlikely to have a major impact on their product portfolio in the short term, they wanted to understand what their future needs might be and to identify areas which their R&D efforts should focus on.

The project story:

The project started with a workshop designed to help define a set of themes, which then enabled us to explore how sustainability might impact our client’s business in the next 5-10 years.

We used one-to-one consultations to build and test hypotheses and a final list of 10 sustainability themes were explored with external stakeholder – including customers, industry commentators, regulators, and NGOs.

A clear set of issues were identified during our conversations with market stakeholders which were then linked to explicit areas of opportunity, threat, and for which R&D initiatives had a substantive role in realising and defending.

Results: deliverables and outcomes

The output was shared with the client’s senior leadership team. It was then used to explore and rationalise specific areas of R&D investment.