Some aspects to take into account when deciding which innovation agency you want to work with are:
These types of innovation agencies have a strong background in design thinking methodologies and typically also offer courses, training and tools to build your internal capacity in them. Their innovation teams often feature service designers, human-centered designers or business innovation consultants with hands-on design skills.
Design and innovation consultancy firms like this can be found more & more. The success of design driven startups like AirBnB & Tesla has pushed this category to new heights! Another example in this consulting cluster is Song (Accenture).
These innovation agencies draw upon the strengths of their parent companies to provide analytics and insights based on big data sets coupled with hundreds of pages of market research. They focus on digital transformation, including the deployment of enterprise technology systems, and their innovation teams often include data scientists and customer digital experience designers.
The best business innovation consultancy firms don’t specialize in just one discipline but cover a wide range of capabilities. Compared to the previous groups, more innovation consultants in this category have a background in innovation management, marketing or economics. Another such agency is Doblin (Deloitte).
These innovation consulting firms work with leaders at different organizational levels to build company innovation strategies and capacity for innovation. Typically this includes creating a shared vision for the future as well as plans for how to track performance, manage resource allocations and identify synergies across a portfolio of core and new growth opportunities.
At Board of Innovation, we offer what we believe are the most important services provided by our best competitors (human-centered design augmented by cutting-edge tech, business model innovation, helping your company build and sustain an innovation strategy) while also providing ways to get rapid validation at every stage of the innovation journey. And we’re an independent business design and innovation strategy firm, so rather than link our services to in-house technical capabilities, we’ll only recommend the best collaborators for your organization’s unique needs.
A list of companies that can be considered our competitors (in some areas).