Beyond Ideation: How FEI25 Revealed the Blueprint for Innovation Value Creation

Architect with blueprint jumping for joy in front of a house.

KEY QUOTES

  • “Technology for the sake of technology doesn’t do anything for anyone. If I’m being very candid, this is one of the big things that Web3 screwed up. It was a lot of like cool tech that solved no needs for anybody and therefore nobody used it.”
  • “AI is a tool that mediates human labor. It fragments human labor, it breaks it up, it automates it, it de-skills it, and it categorizes it.”
  • “There’s a huge risk attached to AI. If you are successful, there’s a risk of transforming your business without even realizing it.”
  • “Innovation has to be a profit center. There’s no excuse. And to do this, you need to be systematic about incubation, because incubation is where everything happens, when you are turning ideas into proof of value.”
  • “99% of the interview process, especially upfront, is focus on that knowledge, and your HR people are not going to be able to assess on these other axes.”

FULL SUMMARY

The Innovation Integration & Value Creation Track at FEI25 provided in-depth insights into how organizations can effectively integrate innovation into their core operations to create predictable value and ensure future growth. The sessions covered diverse aspects, from leveraging AI and understanding human-technology relationships to overcoming organizational and legal barriers, and fostering an engaged, strengths-based workforce.

Innovation as a Differentiator: Looking Back To See The Future

Jonathan Stringfield from Microsoft Advertising explored how video games offer a cognitive framework for understanding AI innovation and human-technology relationships. He argued that successful AI innovation must prioritize human experience and needs over technology for its own sake, drawing parallels between emotional connections with game characters and interactions with AI assistants like Copilot. The session emphasized designing AI interactions that are non-intrusive, contextually relevant, and provide appropriate rewards, leading to a more “Agentic web” where AI works on behalf of users and brands.

AI: The New Innovation Engine

This session explored AI’s transformative impact across the entire innovation funnel, from early-stage R&D to commercialization. The speaker emphasized that AI is not just an automation tool but one that mediates human labor, offering capabilities like summarizing, searching, generating content, acting as an interface, and modeling complex systems. While AI accelerates processes, its implementation must be strategic, considering both value assessment (automation and knowledge value) and practical constraints (time to value, clear metrics). A key warning highlighted was that successful AI implementation can inadvertently transform business priorities through feedback loops, necessitating careful consideration of these second-order effects.

Overcoming IT & Legal Barriers to AI Outcomes for Your Organization

This session delved into the challenges of implementing AI solutions from a legal perspective, noting that lawyers are trained to identify risks rather than opportunities, often lack technical backgrounds, and operate within a traditional apprenticeship model that resists innovation. Key concerns for legal departments include data protection and confidentiality (e.g., proprietary knowledge, training data use), AI hallucinations, records management for eDiscovery, and compliance with evolving regulations. The advice for innovators was to proactively address these concerns with reasonable risk mitigation strategies, rather than promising zero risk, and to engage legal teams early in the process.

Catalyzing Innovation and Change Through Strengths-Based Engagement

Christine Minh Minh Garner highlighted the global workplace disengagement crisis, costing $9.6 trillion annually, with managers being a critical factor in 70% of team engagement variance. She presented a strengths-based approach to combat this, demonstrating how leveraging individual strengths dramatically improves productivity, job satisfaction, and business outcomes. Her company, Talent Alchemy, offers programs that help leaders transition from bosses to coaches by implementing five key habits of high-performing teams: Aiming, Reflecting, High Five, Coffee Sink, and Progress Huddle. This approach emphasizes consistent practice and technology integration to embed strengths-based practices in daily workflows.

Unlocking Innovation at the Intersections of Art, Science and Academia

This session introduced “DaVinci’s Cube,” a three-dimensional model for innovation that expands on traditional frameworks by adding “sentiment” alongside “knowledge” and “use” as key motivational dimensions. Research from a National Endowment for the Arts project revealed that while organizations and individuals value sentiment and use in their work, hiring practices still predominantly focus on knowledge, creating a disconnect in how innovation teams are built. The session advocated for interdisciplinary approaches, creating spaces for unstructured experimentation (like historical Bell Labs), and fostering collaborations between artists, scientists, and industry to drive breakthrough innovation.

Stronger Together: How Progressive Streamlined Crowdsourcing

Progressive Insurance transformed its crowdsourcing approach by partnering with Mind Sumo, moving from a frustrating, time-consuming process to an efficient, flexible system that saved over 150 hours across five challenges. The partnership enabled Progressive to conduct both internal and external challenges, gathering over 800 ideas and gaining valuable outside perspectives that complemented their internal expertise. Mind Sumo’s collaborative platform, responsiveness, and superior reporting capabilities helped Progressive create a self-service model, reduce administrative time, and improve the overall crowdsourcing experience.

How Juanita’s Used Trends-Led Exploration To Break Into New Categories

Juanita’s Foods partnered with DIG Insights to transform its innovation process by starting with trends exploration rather than traditional consumer insights, enabling them to identify new white space opportunities beyond Mexican food categories. This comprehensive program included trends investigation, qualitative research, an immersive field trip to Mexico City with cross-functional stakeholders, platform development, and co-creation workshops. This approach helped Juanita’s shift from a manufacturing-focused operation to an insights-led innovation strategy aimed at defining new product categories that express authenticity in the market.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • AI Accelerates, Human Insights Elevate: AI tools like Atlas and Charlie dramatically increase the speed and scale of innovation by synthesizing data and generating concepts, but continuous injection of fresh, non-conscious human behavioral data is crucial to prevent “model collapse” and ensure creativity and market relevance.
  • Inclusive Design Drives Broader Value: Designing with, not just for, diverse user groups, including those with disabilities, expands market reach and leads to more universally effective and impactful products, proving that inclusive approaches are a strategic business advantage.
  • Strategic Alignment and Economic Value are Paramount: Innovation efforts must be explicitly aligned with clear strategic objectives and driven by the economic value they create for customers (“dollars and cents”), moving beyond just features and benefits to ensure commercial viability and successful “harvesting” of ideas.
  • Cross-Functional Collaboration and Rapid Iteration are Essential: Breaking down silos and fostering cross-functional collaboration from the earliest stages, combined with rapid prototyping and iterative testing, accelerates decision-making, uncovers blind spots, and builds organizational alignment and trust for innovation.
  • Organizational Adaptation is Key for Emerging Technologies: Successfully integrating emerging technologies like AI requires not just technological innovation but also significant cultural and organizational adaptation, including creating specialized agile units and building “coalitions of the willing” to overcome resistance and drive change.

Delivery on Event Focus:
Aligning Innovation with Business Strategy:

The Innovation Integration & Value Creation Track at FEI25 directly addressed aligning innovation with business strategy by showcasing how leading organizations are integrating innovation into their core business processes. Speakers demonstrated how AI-powered tools ensure innovations are grounded in consumer insights and market realities, aligning them with manufacturing capabilities and brand equities. The emphasis on understanding the economic value created for customers underscored that innovation must directly contribute to business outcomes. The sessions highlighted the strategic importance of dual innovation structures, balancing sustaining and transformational efforts to serve both immediate business needs and future growth opportunities. Inclusive design was also presented as a strategic advantage, tapping into underserved markets and creating universally better products. Finally, cross-functional collaboration within innovation teams was shown to be crucial for ensuring innovations remain relevant to business objectives.

Delivery on Event Theme:
Harvesting Innovation & Sowing Seeds of Future Growth:

The track consistently delivered on the theme of “harvesting innovation and sowing seeds of future growth.” It showed how companies are “harvesting” insights from vast consumer data pools through AI and from existing knowledge investments, while simultaneously “sowing seeds” for future growth by exploring white spaces, new brand development, and emerging distribution models. The agricultural metaphor of invention as “sowing the seed” and innovation as “harvesting the crop” was central. The focus on protecting resources for future-focused work, continuous human data injection to prevent AI model collapse, and Welch’s balanced portfolio approach all underscored the commitment to nurturing long-term growth alongside immediate returns.

Action Items for Innovation Experts and Corporate Changemakers:

  1. Pilot AI-Driven Innovation: Evaluate your current ideation processes and pilot AI-driven innovation tools in specific areas (e.g., product development, partnership identification) to demonstrate value and accelerate timelines. Ensure these tools integrate diverse consumer data and align with strategic priorities.
  2. Integrate Automated Behavioral Science: Implement automated behavioral science and implicit testing methodologies to capture non-conscious consumer insights. Establish continuous human data collection systems to regularly inject fresh behavioral and emotional insights into AI models, preventing “model collapse” and fostering true creativity.
  3. Embed Inclusive Design Principles: Audit your design process to ensure diverse user perspectives, particularly from individuals with disabilities, are incorporated from the earliest stages of development. Adopt rapid prototyping and customization options to quickly iterate based on user feedback.
  4. Strengthen Cross-Functional Collaboration: Establish cross-functional innovation teams that meet regularly, breaking down silos and bringing all stakeholders (including legal, regulatory, and finance) into the process early to build shared understanding, address roadblocks creatively, and accelerate decisions.
  5. Assess and Adapt Organizational Structure: Evaluate your allocation of resources between sustaining and transformational innovation, considering separate but connected organizational structures with distinct cultures, metrics, and leadership behaviors. Develop AI competencies now to begin implementing AI tools in non-critical areas to build familiarity and demonstrate value.

FEI25: Reinventing the Human-Centered Innovation Process

Human in center of circles surrounded by circles and gears like a machine or process.

KEY QUOTES

  • “We’re looking at thousands upon thousands of organic consumer pieces of information being fed in, so right there, obviously much more compelling, right? Really grounded in consumer insight and the organic information that consumers are offering up on these product reviews in different forums digitally.”
  • “The top 100 global innovators spend $720 billion on R&D every year, and a single digit percentage of those become commercial realities. It’s not just you. It’s hard. It’s really hard to do this.”
  • “Artificial intelligence is not just another technology. It’s not just another hype. This is going to change mankind society in ways like the light bulb, industrialization and so forth.”
  • “The work that we do in understanding humans and getting deeper insight into the true drivers of behavior is going to become increasingly important as AI accelerates a regression to the mean, we’re the champions of the future.”
  • “Inclusive design is not a limitation, not a setback, but really helps to create great and better innovation. It allows you to be more creative, helps you think outside the box, and collaborate with a great amount of people.”

FULL TRACK SUMMARY

The Innovation Excellence & Best Practices Track at FEI25 offered a comprehensive look into modern innovation strategies, emphasizing the integration of advanced technologies like AI, the critical role of human insights, and the power of collaborative organizational structures. The sessions provided practical frameworks and real-world examples for aligning innovation efforts with overarching business goals and ensuring long-term growth.

Reinventing Innovation and Re-Thinking Possible at the Front End

Erica Norton from Hershey Company detailed how Hershey transformed its innovation process using ZS Associates’ AI-driven “Atlas” tool. This approach leverages thousands of organic consumer data points from online marketplaces and social media to generate product ideas, brand concepts, and partnership opportunities. The AI provides transparency into idea generation and produces high-quality outputs that outperform traditional ideation methods. Hershey applies Atlas for innovation within existing product forms, exploring new pack types, identifying co-branding, and developing new brands. It also aids in M&A due diligence and market intelligence by quickly providing consumer perceptions and competitive positioning.

Harvesting Innovation Through Collective Intelligence

This session differentiated “invention” (sowing seeds—ideas) from “innovation” (harvesting crops—commercial reality). The speaker emphasized that successful innovation requires systematic selection processes driven by economic value creation for customers, focusing on “dollars and cents” over just features and benefits. Organizations must assess internal capabilities and build external innovation ecosystems to bridge gaps for successful commercialization. A sobering statistic was shared: top global innovators spend $720 billion annually on R&D, yet only a single-digit percentage becomes commercial reality.

Driving The Integration of Emerging Technologies

Miele, a 125-year-old premium appliance manufacturer, discussed how it balances technological innovation with organizational adaptation to address the accelerating pace of change. Miele uses a dual approach: transforming traditional R&D units while creating specialized entities like the Emerging Technologies Lab to bridge the gap between startups and corporate structures. Successful integration requires cultural adaptation, overcoming resistance, and securing both top-down and bottom-up support. AI is viewed as a transformative force requiring early adoption to avoid disruption, with practical applications already delivering value in areas like market intelligence and technology scouting.

Emotional Connection: Why Gen AI Needs Continuous Insight Into Real Human Behavior

This session emphasized the critical role of non-conscious human insights for effective innovation, warning that generative AI models trained on their own outputs can experience “model collapse,” losing creativity and regressing to the mean. The solution proposed is the continuous injection of fresh human data, particularly non-conscious emotional and behavioral insights. Automated behavioral science, by quantifying attention, emotion, and non-conscious thought processes, can significantly accelerate innovation cycles from weeks to days while improving market prediction accuracy.

Designing for Everyone: The Power of Inclusive Innovation

This session highlighted that inclusive design is a fundamental approach for all product development, not just assistive technology, benefiting the 25% of adults who identify as having a disability while creating better innovation for everyone. Tatum Robotics’ work on a robotic hand for tactile communication for the deaf-blind community exemplified how co-creation with diverse users, understanding varied needs, and rapid iteration based on direct feedback lead to more effective and impactful products. Inclusive design requires customization and involves users from the earliest stages of development to avoid costly redesigns later.

Igniting Always-On AI Innovation

Lauren Collier and John Ferrera presented “Charlie,” an AI-powered innovation engine that transforms traditional innovation processes into an always-on, adaptive system. Charlie integrates proprietary knowledge, public insights, and internal data to synthesize information, detect trends, generate concepts, and create testable assets in minutes. This approach helps organizations accelerate innovation timelines from months to days and “10x” their exploration capabilities by testing concepts at scale. The session emphasized that speed is a necessity in today’s rapidly changing market, where customer needs are evolving 50 times faster than ever before.

Transformational Innovation Through Collaboration

This session showcased Welch’s Greenhouse, an internal cross-functional incubator designed to drive transformational innovation through collaboration across departments. Unlike traditional isolated innovation teams, Welch’s intentionally built cross-functional teams with representatives from finance, HR, product development, and marketing to create a two-way learning stream and operational efficiencies. Successful innovation requires regular cross-functional meetings, rapid prototyping, and early involvement of all stakeholders (including legal and regulatory). The approach emphasizes building trust, embracing constraints creatively, and maintaining psychological safety while working through uncertainty. The Greenhouse manages innovations through launch and beyond, often balancing a portfolio with 70% focused on commercialization within three years and 30% on longer-term, higher-risk innovation.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • AI Accelerates, Human Insights Elevate: AI tools like Atlas and Charlie dramatically increase the speed and scale of innovation by synthesizing data and generating concepts, but continuous injection of fresh, non-conscious human behavioral data is crucial to prevent “model collapse” and ensure creativity and market relevance.
  • Inclusive Design Drives Broader Value: Designing with, not just for, diverse user groups, including those with disabilities, expands market reach and leads to more universally effective and impactful products, proving that inclusive approaches are a strategic business advantage.
  • Strategic Alignment and Economic Value are Paramount: Innovation efforts must be explicitly aligned with clear strategic objectives and driven by the economic value they create for customers (“dollars and cents”), moving beyond just features and benefits to ensure commercial viability and successful “harvesting” of ideas.
  • Cross-Functional Collaboration and Rapid Iteration are Essential: Breaking down silos and fostering cross-functional collaboration from the earliest stages, combined with rapid prototyping and iterative testing, accelerates decision-making, uncovers blind spots, and builds organizational alignment and trust for innovation.
  • Organizational Adaptation is Key for Emerging Technologies: Successfully integrating emerging technologies like AI requires not just technological innovation but also significant cultural and organizational adaptation, including creating specialized agile units and building “coalitions of the willing” to overcome resistance and drive change.

Delivery on the Event Focus:
Aligning Innovation with Business Strategy:

This track directly addressed aligning innovation with business strategy by showcasing how leading organizations are integrating innovation into their core business processes. Speakers demonstrated how AI-powered tools ensure innovations are grounded in consumer insights and market realities, aligning them with manufacturing capabilities and brand equities. The emphasis on understanding the economic value created for customers underscored that innovation must directly contribute to business outcomes. The sessions highlighted the strategic importance of dual innovation structures, balancing sustaining and transformational efforts to serve both immediate business needs and future growth opportunities. Inclusive design was also presented as a strategic advantage, tapping into underserved markets and creating universally better products.

Delivery on the Event Theme: 

Harvesting Innovation & Sowing Seeds of Future Growth:

The track consistently delivered on the theme of “harvesting innovation and sowing seeds of future growth.” It showed how companies are “harvesting” insights from vast consumer data pools through AI and from existing knowledge investments, while simultaneously “sowing seeds” for future growth by exploring white spaces, new brand development, and emerging distribution models. The agricultural metaphor of invention as “sowing the seed” and innovation as “harvesting the crop” was central. The focus on protecting resources for future-focused work, continuous human data injection to prevent AI model collapse, and Welch’s balanced portfolio approach all underscored the commitment to nurturing long-term growth alongside immediate returns.

Action Items for Innovation Experts and Corporate Changemakers:

  1. Pilot AI-Driven Innovation: Evaluate your current ideation processes and pilot AI-driven innovation tools in specific areas (e.g., product development, partnership identification) to demonstrate value and accelerate timelines. Ensure these tools integrate diverse consumer data and align with strategic priorities.
  2. Integrate Automated Behavioral Science: Implement automated behavioral science and implicit testing methodologies to capture non-conscious consumer insights. Establish continuous human data collection systems to regularly inject fresh behavioral and emotional insights into AI models, preventing “model collapse” and fostering true creativity.
  3. Embed Inclusive Design Principles: Audit your design process to ensure diverse user perspectives, particularly from individuals with disabilities, are incorporated from the earliest stages of development. Adopt rapid prototyping and customization options to quickly iterate based on user feedback.
  4. Strengthen Cross-Functional Collaboration: Establish cross-functional innovation teams that meet regularly, breaking down silos and bringing all stakeholders (including legal, regulatory, and finance) into the process early to build shared understanding, address roadblocks creatively, and accelerate decisions.
  5. Assess and Adapt Organizational Structure: Evaluate your allocation of resources between sustaining and transformational innovation, considering separate but connected organizational structures with distinct cultures, metrics, and leadership behaviors. Develop AI competencies now to begin implementing AI tools in non-critical areas to build familiarity and demonstrate value.

FEI25: Aligning Business Success Through Strategic Transformation

KEY QUOTES

  • “This whole shift to consumer centricity means a few different things… every innovation that we put into our innovation pipeline has to have a consumer need or a consumer intention that it’s answering, and that consumer need or intention also has to align with our business strategy.”
  • “There’s no such thing as a boring category. There’s just boring execution.”
  • “Product communication doesn’t happen after the work—it is the work.”
  • “The only edge that your rivals can’t copy is an architected customer journey that compounds value and differentiation across moments.”
  • “Human obsession and understanding the real problem to solve is the only way that you’ll commercialize excellent product and product execution.”

Full Track Summary: Strategy & Transformation

The Strategy & Transformation Track at FEI25 provided a multifaceted exploration of how organizations can effectively align innovation with business strategy to drive sustainable growth. Across multiple sessions, speakers from leading companies like Lagunitas, PepsiCo, and Procter & Gamble, along with innovation experts, shared insights on consumer-centricity, emotional innovation, effective communication, and organizational design.

Delivering on an Integrated Innovation Strategy: A P&G Case Study

Procter & Gamble’s R&D strategy highlights the challenge of managing both sustaining innovation (optimizing current products) and disruptive/discontinuous innovation (new products, business models). Liza Sanchez explained that these require different organizational structures, leadership behaviors, and metrics. P&G allocates 70-80% of resources to sustaining innovation and 20-30% to transformational innovation, emphasizing the need to protect resources for future-focused work. Transformational innovation requires managing uncertainty and embracing experimentation, contrasting with sustaining innovation’s focus on risk management and process. P&G’s consumer-centric approach leverages core competencies across business units to create “irresistible superiority,” testing complete propositions early in the innovation funnel.

Designing Innovation with Human-Centered Approaches and AI

PepsiCo Design’s approach to innovation is deeply human-centered, focusing on defining the right problems to solve, embracing talent, and championing integration. Their methodology employs a “double diamond” approach with four key lenses: feasibility, viability, sustainability, and desirability, ensuring early connection with the broader organization to build trust. PepsiCo is also heavily leveraging AI to enhance design innovation, using tools like ChatGPT and Adobe Firefly for storyboarding, journey mapping, and customer engagement. Examples like the Bear snacks expansion and Wing drone delivery demonstrated how design drives both short-term and long-term innovation by exploring new categories and emerging distribution models.

Activating Emotional Innovation and Redefining Value

Another critical aspect of innovation discussed was the emphasis on “emotional innovation” over technical innovation alone. The speaker, who created successful brands like Method, EOS, Hello, and Happy Coffee, argued that “there’s no such thing as a boring category, just boring execution”. True innovation, he posited, comes from creating products that connect with people’s hearts and are “as endearing as they are enduring”—products people would genuinely miss if they disappeared. This approach shifts the focus from disruption to delighting consumers, with disruption being a byproduct of that delight. The concept of “responsibility” was highlighted as more meaningful than corporate “purpose” or “mission,” exemplified by Happy Coffee’s partnership with NAMI, which included giving NAMI an ownership stake in the company. This perspective encourages brands to focus on people, not just “consumers” or “targets,” and to recognize that “ideals are important and there’s margin in meaning.”

Why Stories, Not Just Science, Should Start in the Lab

The session “Why Stories, Not Just Science, Should Start in the Lab” emphasized that product communication should be developed simultaneously with product innovation, not as an afterthought. Most innovations fail due to poor storytelling rather than poor product quality, as “people don’t buy the best products; they buy the products that they understand the fastest”. The “Who, How, Wow” framework was introduced to help innovators distill complex scientific concepts into compelling, three-second “wow” moments. This framework encourages identifying the target audience and their problem (“Who”), explaining the science simply (“How”), and articulating the transformative result (“Wow”). Early cross-functional collaboration, termed “Wow Workshops,” brings together teams like marketing, R&D, and legal to develop the product story alongside the product itself, ensuring alignment and preventing “phantom work.”

Killing “Me Too” Innovation

To combat “me too” innovation, a four-move strategic framework was presented: developing critical insights, embracing iteration, mapping customer journeys, and enhancing value through experience. Critical insights go beyond surface-level trends and require personal engagement, listening to the right people, building trust, trading quantity for understanding, and including live observation. Iteration is crucial for refining these insights before scaling. Mapping the customer journey—identifying all touchpoints from awareness to repurchase—helps create a competitive advantage that rivals cannot easily copy by enabling unique business decisions and an integrated system. Finally, enhancing value by adding “Experience” alongside Price and Quality transforms transactions into loyalty and enables higher margins.

Navigating Disruption

The “Navigating Disruption” workshop introduced “constrained consumption” as a new economic context shaped by three emerging consumer trends: the Appetite Edit (GLP-1 drugs’ impact beyond food), Money Maxing (economic uncertainty driving value redefinition), and Buycott (values-based shopping). These trends fundamentally alter consumer behaviors, from reduced impulse purchasing to increased financial literacy and values-driven buying decisions. Businesses must pivot from promoting instant gratification to emphasizing purposeful pleasure, delayed gratification, and aligning with consumer values.

Brewing Innovation Through Consumer Centricity and Strategic Patience

Lagunitas has significantly transformed its innovation approach by becoming truly consumer-centric, ensuring every new product addresses a specific consumer need while aligning with their business strategy. The company categorizes innovations into “big bets” (within core beer expertise) and “future bets” (stretch products that may take up to 10 years to fully develop). Both categories undergo rigorous testing, but future bets are given extended time to develop and prove themselves in the market, recognizing that successful brands often require significant time to gain traction. Lagunitas uses its taproom as an initial testing ground, and successful offerings sometimes become commercial products. Despite being owned by Heineken, Lagunitas maintains its distinct brand identity by focusing on quality products and understanding different consumer demand moments, exploring growth areas like non-alcoholic beverages while staying true to their craft brewing roots. Quality is seen as a key differentiator in a crowded market.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • Consumer-Centricity is Paramount: Every innovation must address a specific consumer need or intention and align with business strategy, moving beyond chasing trends to truly understanding and meeting consumer desires.
  • Emotional Connection Drives Success: True innovation stems from emotional resonance; products that delight and connect with people’s hearts are more likely to be endearing, enduring, and ultimately successful.
  • Communication is Integral to Innovation: Product communication should be developed alongside the product itself, distilling complex concepts into clear, compelling “three-second wow” moments that ensure rapid consumer understanding and market traction.
  • Strategic Differentiation via Experience & Iteration: To avoid “me too” innovation, companies must develop deep, critical insights, embrace iterative development, map comprehensive customer journeys, and enhance value through unique experiences beyond just price and quality.
  • Dual Innovation Structures are Essential: Organizations must adopt separate but connected structures for sustaining (incremental) and transformational (disruptive) innovation, with distinct cultures, metrics, and leadership behaviors, while deliberately protecting resources for future-focused initiatives.

How This Track Delivers on the Event Focus:
Aligning Innovation with Business Strategy:

The Strategy & Transformation Track at FEI25 directly addressed aligning innovation with business strategy by providing actionable frameworks and real-world examples. Sessions emphasized that effective innovation is not merely about creating new products but ensuring these products meet specific consumer needs while contributing to overarching business goals and growth. Speakers detailed how strategic patience, understanding demand moments, and leveraging core competencies are crucial for commercial viability. The track demonstrated how emotional innovation drives market success and how early product communication aligns R&D with marketing to create commercially viable products. Furthermore, it highlighted the necessity of organizational structures that support both sustaining and transformational innovation, linking R&D strategy to overall business objectives and long-term portfolio management.

How This Session Delivers on the Event Theme:
Harvesting Innovation & Sowing Seeds of Future Growth:

The track embodied the theme of “harvesting innovation and sowing seeds of future growth” by presenting strategies for both extracting immediate value from existing innovations and cultivating new opportunities for the future. Concepts like “big bets” (harvesting core expertise) and “future bets” (sowing seeds for long-term development) illustrated this duality. The emphasis on giving experimental products up to 10 years to develop demonstrated a commitment to nurturing innovation for sustainable growth rather than expecting immediate returns. The sessions showed how harvesting deep customer insights from current conditions can fuel differentiated innovations, while exploring emerging trends like “constrained consumption” and investing in new technologies like AI or drone delivery represent sowing seeds for future market relevance and growth. P&G’s model of allocating resources to both sustaining and transformational innovation further reinforced the importance of balancing immediate returns with long-term growth through deliberate portfolio management.

Action Items for Innovation Experts and Corporate Changemakers:

  1. Implement Consumer-Centric Filters: Create clear criteria for all innovation ideas, requiring them to address specific consumer needs and align with business strategy. Conduct deep, qualitative research and direct observation to gain critical insights beyond surface-level trends or AI-generated data.
  2. Develop a Two-Track Innovation System: Establish separate but connected organizational structures for “big bets” (sustaining, core business extensions) and “future bets” (experimental ventures), with distinct timelines, metrics, leadership behaviors, and protected resources for each.
  3. Integrate Product Communication Early: Conduct “Wow Workshops” early in the innovation process, bringing together cross-functional teams (R&D, marketing, legal) to align on the product story and develop the “Who, How, Wow” communication framework simultaneously with product development.
  4. Prioritize Emotional Design and Experience: Reframe innovation by asking how products make people feel, focusing on creating emotional connections and building enduring brands. Map the entire customer journey to identify and design differentiated experiences that transform transactions into loyalty, expanding the value equation beyond just price and quality.
  5. Embrace Iteration and Test Early: Restructure innovation processes to include multiple rounds of exploration, agile market learning, and agile product testing, allowing insights to evolve and deepen before scaling. Leverage existing assets like company taprooms or pilot programs for real-world testing of complete propositions (technical, commercial, organizational).