Strategy for growth – working with you to define, develop and embed your growth plans

Having a robust understanding of direction is a critical part of building and growing a business. A well-considered business strategy helps provide clear direction and drives your business forward, giving you a roadmap for the future. 

• What is the businesses attitude towards risk and growth and what drives you as a senior team?

• Within what constraints do you need to work?

• Are you achieving a balancing of ambition with realism? 

We help organisations develop effective strategies for growth, supporting them to reduce risk through insight.

Specialities:

• Understanding the business environment – helping you reassess the external forces and trends shaping your business world, creating insight and intelligence for smarter strategies, and helping you create more robust and competitive business models.

• Building effective value propositions – helping you understand the value you deliver to your customers, what customer problems you are solving or needs you are satisfying, and what products and services you are offering to each customer group.

• Generating robust business models – helping facilitate business model innovation, developing and manipulating business models to create new and exciting options to exploit great value propositions.

We provide all the implementation support you need – turning your business model into action, helping you align it with your strategy, structure, processes, systems and people.

Insight – helping make sense of your idea and its place in the world

Everyone knows that running a thriving company is as much about what’s happening outside the business as within it.  Looking up from everyday tasks to see what’s going on in the wider world might be the way to gain valuable perspective and insights and open up market and innovation opportunities.  But we all know it’s not always possible. 

We have extensive experience of helping clients utilise business information and insight to create understanding of market environments, competitive positions, customer needs, supplier capabilities and technology landscapes – supporting them interpret business information for the strategic benefit of their organisations.  

Specialities:

• Strategic market research – providing a knowledge base upon which to develop and implement policy and strategy decisions

• Business and technology research – providing organisations with a greater understanding of their market and technology opportunities

• Customer insight – customer journeys, customer experience and voice of the customer (and non-customers)

We focus on helping our clients create genuine market-led value propositions built on a foundation of strong business, customer and technology insight.  We find better quality information, analyse it, and put it into context for you.

Innovation and creativity – great idea generation and help to innovate

Successful innovation involves a careful blend of knowledge, creativity, analysis, skills and leadership. While many organisations know where their strengths lie and when they need outside help, it isn't always easy to bring in the perfect strength at exactly the right time. 

This is why we offer a unique portfolio of proven innovation services so that companies can choose exactly what they want, when they want it.

Our approach to innovation means that we look beyond products and processes, and also focus on people. We embed the skills and attitudes that enable organisations to grow, innovate and thrive.

Specialities:

• Leading creativity, inspiration and imagination workshops

• Generating new ideas and concepts

• Facilitating business model innovation

• Building successful innovative organisational cultures

• Innovating business processes 

Whatever the direction or duration of your innovation journey, our team will work with you to make it direct, cost efficient and commercially effective.

Strategic marketing – letting the world know what you do

A great business is only profitable if people know who you are and what you do.  Whilst basic direct marketing with a dash of social media and a website will set you up, it’s not a long-term plan. 

Good marketing needs a strategy and solid leadership.  There are a few golden questions you need to answers before you start:

• Marketing: What is it that we as a business offer? Who do we want to talk to, why and what about? How would someone go about finding us?

• Brand: What are our values? What do we want people to say about us? What do people say about us?

Once the knowledge is in place you can construct a framework for getting an outstanding reputation in your field and a solid market share.

Excellent marketing is about strategy and intelligence. A blend of these can supersize a business and its customer base.  It can help you sell more to existing clients, gain ground in new markets, forge new alliances and even reach the unengaged. 

Specialities: 

• Brand strategy – developing insight on who your brand is and aligning a plan to drive the business’ reputation to where you want to be.

• Integrated marketing – making your marketing work harder, designing complimentary projects that work together to build a holistic market presence.

• Digital strategy – helping companies establishing a strong and functional digital footprint and engage with a rapidly increasing digital audience.

• Product branding and launching – working with businesses to build a robust and future-proof brand hierarchy for products and services; also designing strategies for bringing what's new to market in a fresh and vibrant way.

Funding innovation and R&D – making innovation affordable

There are many ways to successfully leverage and secure financial support for your innovation, R&D and new product development activities. We know it can be complex, confusing and time consuming to identify the best match for your needs.

We can help maximise your internal project budgets and secure additional resources to help accelerate project activity. We have a great understanding of the options and routes to identify, target and secure funding for your innovation. From local and regional business support initiatives, national innovation loans and grant programmes, European collaborative research projects, or the strategic use of incentive schemes such as R&D tax credits and Patent Box.

We have the networks, knowledge, and experience to advise and support on the best route forward.

Specialities:

• Building robust and compelling business cases – helping justify the opportunity, need and impact of innovation investment

• Identifying optimal funding sources – leveraging our deep understanding of the UK and European innovation funding and finance ecosystem

• Securing investment – utilising our record of winning UK and European innovation grants, tax credits and other incentives

We focus on helping our clients access the right financial support at the right time in their innovation cycle. We help ensure innovation and R&D is affordable, securing maximum financial leverage from external sources of funding support making your money go further.