Accelerating Speed to Market by Reducing Innovation Ambiguity

Why innovation systems need to optimise for both momentum + depth

The conversation around innovation has become increasingly dominated by speed. Every organisation is looking for ways to shorten development timelines, reduce time to market and increase the return on every pound invested in innovation. Consumer expectations continue to evolve, retailers expect innovation to work harder than ever before, and R&D organisations are being asked to deliver more with the same, or fewer, resources. McKinsey recently described the challenge facing consumer goods companies as one of restoring product superiority while also rebuilding brand relevance, highlighting just how central successful innovation has become to sustainable business growth.

Against that backdrop, it is hardly surprising that organisations have become increasingly good at designing innovation systems that create momentum. Stage-gates provide governance, concept testing helps organisations prioritise investment, and clear milestones ensure projects continue to move towards launch. These have all been important advances, bringing greater discipline, transparency and commercial rigour to product development.

What they don’t necessarily guarantee, however, is that the team has developed a sufficiently deep understanding of the person they are designing for before significant technical investment begins. When that understanding is still developing, innovation ambiguity doesn’t disappear simply because a project has progressed through a gate. Instead, it often travels with the project, becoming embedded and amplified within the product brief, quietly influencing formulation, claims, packaging and prototype development long before anyone realises different people are still imagining different products.

Perhaps this helps explain why organisations have become better at moving innovation programmes through development, while the commercial performance of new launches continues to frustrate many leadership teams. Circana’s latest New Product Pacesetters report demonstrates that breakthrough innovation remains one of the industry’s greatest commercial opportunities, with the strongest launches generating more than $6 billion in first-year sales. At the same time, Kantar continues to identify familiar reasons why innovations disappoint after launch, including unclear positioning, unmet expectations and assumptions made too early in development. Looked at together, these findings suggest that the challenge is not innovation itself, but the quality of understanding that underpins it.

Reflecting on the projects we’ve been fortunate enough to support over the years, it is striking how rarely these issues originate only in the laboratory. More often, they can be traced back to decisions made much earlier, when everyone quite reasonably believed they had reached alignment, but were still carrying different interpretations of the product they were trying to build.

One of the simplest ways I’ve found to explain this is to think about asking a hairdresser for a textured bob. Everyone involved believes they understand what has been requested and there is enough shared understanding for the haircut to begin. It is only afterwards that it becomes obvious that the hairdresser, the client and everyone else in the room had each been imagining a slightly different hairstyle. Nobody was wrong. They simply hadn’t yet developed a shared understanding of what “great” actually looked like.

Early innovation concepts often behave in exactly the same way.

Innovation ambiguity is rarely obvious in the earliest stages because it is hidden beneath broad organisational agreement. Teams agree that consumers want convenience, confidence or superior performance, but those broad targets can still mean very different things once R&D begins translating them into ingredients, formulations, structures or packaging. The project continues to gather momentum, and it is only later, as technical decisions become increasingly specific, that those subtle differences in interpretation begin to surface, often requiring teams to revisit decisions they believed had already been made.

This, perhaps, is the distinction between momentum and depth.

Momentum helps organisations move forward. Depth helps organisations move forward with clarity.

Both matter enormously. Products only create value once they reach the market, so innovation systems should absolutely continue to create momentum. The challenge is that momentum and depth of understanding are not always the same thing. A project often gathers considerable pace while still carrying unresolved innovation ambiguity, simply because the systems guiding it are rewarding forward movement rather than diagnosing whether the underlying understanding is sufficiently rigorous.

This is why we have become increasingly interested in what happens before significant technical investment begins.

When we talk about developing deeper user understanding, we are not simply advocating more research. We are talking about replacing innovation ambiguity with genuine clarity. That means understanding not only what consumers say they want, but what they are genuinely trying to achieve in the context of their everyday lives, what success looks and feels like from their perspective, what sensory cues tell them a product is delivering, and what they already perceive today as their own gold standard.

Those questions are critical because they give R&D something much more valuable than a collection of general consumer insights.

They provide a technical blueprint.

Instead of trying to optimise against multiple interpretations of consumer need, R&D teams are working from a shared understanding of the experience they are trying to create. Formulation priorities become clearer because the technical challenge has been defined more precisely. Packaging decisions become more purposeful because they are anchored to a specific user experience. Claims emerge more naturally because they reflect a product that has already been designed around a clearly understood outcome rather than attempting to strengthen an ambiguous proposition afterwards.

Importantly, none of this diminishes the role of quantitative concept testing. Quantitative research remains one of the most valuable ways of evaluating clearly defined propositions and supporting commercial investment decisions. The opportunity is not to replace momentum with depth, but to ensure that momentum is built upon sufficient depth of understanding that the concepts entering quantitative evaluation are genuinely specific enough to produce meaningful and predictive results, doing so faster than when depth of consumer understanding is lacking.

That distinction is increasingly important. NIQ’s latest Innovation Vitality research found that brands generating stronger innovation growth consistently build around clearly defined consumer needs and differentiated product experiences rather than relying on incremental line extensions alone. Consumers have not become less interested in innovation. If anything, they have become much more discerning about which innovations genuinely deserve their attention.

So how should the next generation of innovation systems balance speed + depth?

For many years we have focused, quite rightly, on creating momentum. The opportunity now may be to complement that momentum with systems that deliberately create depth before commitment, supporting R&D teams with better ways of diagnosing innovation ambiguity before it becomes embedded within product development.

The organisations that consistently deliver successful innovation are unlikely to optimise for one or the other. They will increasingly design innovation systems that create both, allowing teams to move quickly because they have first taken the time to understand deeply. When depth and momentum work together, innovation ambiguity is reduced, technical decisions become clearer, products become stronger and commercial outcomes become more predictive.

This systems thinking has shaped the development of Innovation Gym at Untapped Innovation. Rather than adding more stages to innovation or asking already busy project teams to slow down, the R&D framework from the Innovation Gym provides practical tools and templates that help teams systemically build deeper user understanding at pace, diagnose innovation ambiguity early, and translate those insights into clear technical blueprints and stories that guide more commercially successful product development.

If you’re interested in exploring how your own innovation systems could create both greater momentum and greater depth, you can learn more about Innovation Gym here: