Is competitor activity setting your innovation agenda?

R&D teams are under considerable pressure to deliver more distinctive products, launch faster and generate stronger commercial returns, often with tighter budgets and fewer resources. The scientists and engineers doing this work want to develop high-quality products, supported by sound science and a clear understanding of how they will improve consumers’ lives.

However, a carefully considered innovation programme can lose direction when competitor activity unsettles the organisation. An unexpected launch, an unfamiliar technology or an ambitious claim catches the attention of senior leadership, and confidence in the existing programme starts to weaken. Have we missed something? Are we falling behind? How quickly can we respond?

These concerns are very understandable. Leaders are accountable for growth, and competitor activity can influence consumer expectations, retailer conversations and the strength of an existing proposition. Some launches genuinely change the assumptions behind a programme; the discipline is to establish which assumptions have changed before redirecting the team. Without that assessment, the urgency of responding can displace the reasoning behind work already underway. R&D is asked to benchmark, investigate and reconsider, while commercial colleagues seek reassurance that the business has the right priorities.

In very crowded categories, such as beauty and personal care, consumer healthcare or food & beverage, this can become a persistent source of distraction. There is always another formulation to investigate, performance claim to evaluate or technology to understand. Detailed competitive analysis requires considerable expertise and time, and each investigation can generate further questions about the development brief.

And the costs extend well beyond the actual benchmarking activities. Repeated changes of direction reopen decisions, interrupt technical work and make teams reluctant to commit resources to an approach that may soon change again. An organisation asking for greater speed can inadvertently create the conditions that slow its innovation programme down.

The challenge for R&D is to give commercial colleagues sufficient confidence in the consumer opportunity that every competitor launch does not reopen the entire brief. That requires a clear choice of target consumer, a deeply understood pain-point and clear evidence explaining why it deserves commercial investment.

W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne provide a useful strategic foundation in Blue Ocean Strategy. Their approach centres on creating new demand through a substantial increase in buyer value, pursuing differentiation and low cost together. Making the competition irrelevant involves reconsidering accepted category expectations and identifying opportunities that existing offerings leave unresolved.

For R&D, this thinking needs to translate into a precise definition of the problem. A consumer’s description of discomfort, poor performance or inconvenience is the starting point for investigation. Scientists must establish the physical, chemical or biological root-causes, then define the product attributes and evidence required to address them.

This is particularly valuable when consumers have stopped questioning the compromises they make. They may avoid certain occasions, adapt how they use a product or accept an unsatisfactory experience without being able to articulate a better alternative. Understanding those unarticulated and subconscious behaviours can reveal breakthrough opportunities that a comparison of existing products would leave unexplored.

Examples across beauty care, food and beverage, and consumer healthcare illustrate how a clearer user problem can focus the development task.

In beauty care, Starface’s colourful patches challenge the expectation that every sign of a breakout should be concealed. Its original hydrocolloid stars absorb fluid and protect spots from contamination, while their deliberately visible design brings an opportunity for consumer self-expression and acceptance. The user problem encompasses both caring for a spot and feeling comfortable being seen with it, which creates a product brief in which appearance, adhesion, flexibility and comfort work alongside the functional properties of hydrocolloid. Making the product desirable to wear openly also creates an opportunity for use during everyday activities, a significant point of difference vs. more traditional, topical acne products.

In food and beverage, M&S’s Strawberry and Creme Sandwich combines strawberries and whipped cream cheese with soft, sweet bread. Launched in 2025, it sold more than one million packs in five weeks, according to M&S. and its appeal can be understood through the desire for a more enjoyable alternative to predictable food-to-go choices. Familiar flavours and a recognisable format make the proposition intuitive, with a twist that encourages discovery. Focusing on the opportunity this way gives development a specific direction, beyond continually finding another way to improve a more established savoury sandwich.

At the intersection between consumer healthcare and everyday nutrition, Huel sets itself apart from traditional supplement competitors by addressing the difficulty of managing a high-nutrition meal when time and preparation are constrained. Huel positions Black Edition Powder as a complete meal containing protein, carbohydrates, fats, fibre, vitamins and minerals, giving it a different role from a supplement that adds selected nutrients to an existing diet.

Across these examples, clear target definition combined with deep pain-point understanding, provides both creative direction and a basis for deciding where to invest technical effort. It also helps explain why a product development programme should retain its focus when noisy competing activity creates pressure to change.

At Untapped Innovation, this is the work we support through Innovation Gym. The Untapped Product Story® tool connects what consumers wish were different, why current products fall short, how a breakthrough could address the underlying cause and what the resulting experience should deliver. Keeping that narrative highly visible helps R&D and commercial colleagues evaluate new information against a deeper, shared understanding of the opportunity.

AI makes this discipline increasingly consequential. In their INSEAD article, Why Strategy Matters in the Age of AI, Kim, Mauborgne and Mi Ji argue that technology investment needs to follow a clear strategy for creating buyer value. Powerful technology alone does not establish a compelling reason for consumers to choose an offering. Faster analysis can help teams investigate competitor activity, but it cannot substitute for deciding which consumer problems the business should pursue. Without that clarity, organisations risk responding more efficiently to an ever-increasing number of distractions.

The leadership opportunity is to move from feeling spooked by competitor activity to making confident, evidence-based decisions about its relevance. A well-defined consumer problem helps teams recognise when a change is justified and explain when the existing programme should continue. When teams spend less time reopening agreed decisions, they can spend more time resolving technical uncertainties and progressing development. That supports fewer avoidable iterations, more predictable timelines and better products with a clearer reason to be chosen.

For businesses seeking faster innovation, reducing distraction is therefore a practical commercial priority: protecting R&D capacity, improving the productivity of development investment and giving promising products a stronger opportunity to succeed.