By Natasha Weith 

Innovation is often seen as a creative pursuit—a way for businesses to stay ahead, differentiate, and drive growth. But for many companies, the innovation process feels uncertain. How do you know if an idea will resonate in the market? Will consumers adopt a new product, behavior, or service? How do you distinguish between a promising concept and a costly misstep? 

Most innovation initiatives are guided by internal vision, expert intuition, and trend analysis—all valuable inputs. But in a rapidly shifting consumer landscape, these elements alone aren’t enough. 

Too many innovations fail—not because they weren’t good ideas, but because they weren’t validated in the real world before launch. The key to success? Embedding consumer input via market research into every stage of innovation instead of treating it as a final checkpoint.

The Risks of Relying on Internal Assumptions 

Companies often assume they “know” their market. Here’s where innovation efforts commonly go wrong: 

• Overconfidence in Industry Knowledge – Even the most experienced teams can miss shifting consumer attitudes and behaviors. 
• Speed-to-Market Pressure – Rushing a launch without real-world validation leads to costly post-launch pivots. 
• Relying on Trends Instead of Market Reality – Trends reveal what’s happening now, not what drives long-term adoption. 
• Internal R&D Without External Input – What works in the lab doesn’t always work in-market. 

The result? Companies invest millions in ideas that sound good internally but fail to gain traction.

How Market Forces Shape Innovation Success 

Consumers don’t just react to new offerings—they make trade-offs based on convenience, price, and habit. A product might be superior on paper, but that doesn’t mean consumers will switch. 

To succeed, businesses must: 

• Understand behavioral drivers – Why do consumers choose one product over another? 
• Assess competitive response – How will existing players react? 
• Brand fit?  Do consumers believe this brand should offer a certain product? 
• Time the market correctly – Is the category ready for this innovation? 

Without these insights, even a groundbreaking innovation can flop.

The Missing Link: Embedding Consumer Insights into Innovation Strategy 

The most successful companies don’t just test ideas—they build them alongside the target consumer using agile, iterative research. However, even companies that invest in research get it wrong when they: 

✖︎ Use Research as a One-Time final checkpoint – Instead of a continuous input, insights are only used for last-minute validation. 

✖︎ Seek Confirmation Instead of Challenge – Teams look for data to support their pre-existing beliefs instead of stress-testing their assumptions. 

✖︎ Over-Rely on Stated Consumer Intent – What consumers say they’ll do and what they actually do aren’t always the same. 

✖︎ Fail to Connect Insights to Execution – Research reports sit in PowerPoints instead of shaping strategy and launch plans in real-time.

That’s where agile market research comes in. And let’s be clear: Agile research isn’t just about speed – it’s about making sure insights are integrated into the development process and at every decision point. Here’s how:

Build a Research System That Moves at the Speed of Business 

• Shift from slow, long-cycle studies to fast, iterative research cycles that provide continuous feedback. 
• Use rolling consumer feedback instead of one-off surveys.
  

Bridge the Gap Between Insights and Execution 

• Ensure research teams sit alongside decision-makers so insights aren’t siloed. 
• Use real-time testing & iteration to refine ideas in-market, not just pre-launch.
   

Scale Research Without Scaling Costs 

• Right-size your research based on business risk, not just volume. 
• Use On-Demand Talent to provide insights support on smaller-scale DIY product development processes.
  

By embedding agile insights, companies create faster, more successful go-to-market strategies—without unnecessary spend.

Final Thoughts 

It’s easy to get excited about a breakthrough idea. But without rigorous, real-time consumer input, even the most promising innovations can fail. 

The best companies don’t just test innovations—they co-develop them with their consumer target. They ensure research isn’t a last-minute formality but a continuous input that sharpens ideas and launch plans and accelerates success. 

As you think about your next big move—whether launching a new product, repositioning a brand, or identifying a growth opportunity—ask yourself: 

• Are we making assumptions, or do we have real consumer intelligence? 
• Is our research shaping decisions, or just confirming them? 
• Are insights integrated throughout the process, or just at the end? 

If you’re not fully confident in the answers, it’s time to rethink how market research fits into your innovation strategy.

About SIVO 

At SIVO, we help businesses turn market research into a competitive advantage. Whether you're validating early-stage concepts, refining go-to-market strategies, or optimizing post-launch success, we ensure that insights fuel smarter, faster decision-making at every stage of the process. 

Our senior insights professionals specialize in agile, in-context research that goes beyond validation to actively shape breakthrough innovations. And with On-Demand Talent, we provide fractional research experts to scale your capabilities—without long-term hiring commitments. 

Want to sharpen your innovation strategy? Contact us at Contact@SIVOInsights.com or visit SIVOInsights.com to learn more. 

When you read the news these days, regarding women leaving the workforce, the outlook and reality seem bleak. According to the Wall Street Journal,

“Due to challenges created by the COVID-19 crisis, more than 1-in-4 women are considering downshifting their careers or leaving the workforce completely.”

The White House Fact Sheet, April 21, 2021 also reported,

“There are now 3.7 million fewer women working than there were in February 2020, in large part because of the pandemic, eroding more than 30 years of progress in women’s labor force participation.”

Not only are these the facts, but this has been my reality. I have spent the last decade and a half building a business career in a traditional corporate setting, across Consumer-Packaged Goods companies that span from cereal to mascara. I’ve built a rich network of connections, and grown my skillset to span across sales, marketing, research, and innovation. I’ve invested in my career, but COVID-19 made me re-evaluate where my investment was most needed.

Trending

Do customers want to ‘hire’ your product?

Maintaining a Work-Life Balance During Lockdown

When the lockdown hit in March of 2020, I added an entire workstream to my day job: manage childcare and distance learning for my two young children. I also lost my part-time nanny, my relief and respite, due to the pandemic. I did not know how I would stay afloat, deliver against my job’s requirements, while also ensuring that my kids got what they needed.

COVID realities created both unreliable childcare and unreliable school days. One exposure could turn any sense of schedule or order upside down. Some of those months went by in a blur. I recognized something had to give. I had to give. I had to make a change for myself and my family. I chose to leave my corporate job to explore something more sustainable for my life.

Fast forward to early spring 2021 and some of the facts and realities haven’t changed all that much. While the nation is becoming hopeful with relaxing Covid restrictions and rise in vaccinations, women have not as readily returned to the workforce. This year, I shifted to the gig economy and started a new career as a Research Strategy Consultant with SIVO’s On-Demand Talent team, a local women-owned agency that really understands what it looks like to do the work you love while also being present for your family.

Working for a Women-Owned Agency and Getting Support

For me SIVO has been a beacon, offering me a way to continue investing in my career without compromising my family, especially during a pandemic. SIVO is a woman owned and operated business founded on the belief that the world needs more people doing what they love. SIVO recognized 12 years ago there was an overflow of great talent that wanted to work but NEEDED flexibility, especially parents juggling family and childcare demands.

I’ve learned that part of making it ‘work’ as a working mom is to find the type of work that meets your needs. Workplace norms have pivoted to meet marketplace realities. My advice to women is to consider something that fits YOUR lifestyle priorities instead of the other way around.
I love being a part of an organization like SIVO, a company committed to redefining what work looks like. SIVO is helping companies work differently through their On Demand Talent (ODT) practice, which helps fill in resource gaps for short or longer-term engagements. Sometimes a company just needs an extra perspective on a special project, or someone to fill in during a parental leave.

On-Demand Talent with SIVO

SIVO’s ODT can provide the right talent – at the right time – so that companies can keep moving forward without disrupting workflows or putting additional strain on existing staff. I am currently on an ODT assignment and am loving the opportunity to work on unique business problems while, not only continuing to nurture my professional career, but also be the kind of mom I want to be for my family.

 Schedule a Discovery Call Today

Are you curious what working differently looks like? – just ask. SIVO Insights can help you figure out the best path forward for you or your company to get the resources – and talent – you need. Schedule a discovery call today to get started.

The great resignation took a major toll on businesses across industries in the last few years. Businesses that prided themselves in workplace culture, flexibility, and benefits saw long-time employees step down from their roles. At the same time, more and more companies face transformative restructuring, like acquisitions and mergers. Following such major changes in the world at large and within organizations, the opinions and beliefs held by workers changed tremendously, and even the most forward-thinking businesses have suffered the consequences. 

With that, many businesses are looking for a path toward improving performance and commitment in the workplace. How can they avoid employee attrition in the future? How can they improve their processes to boost efficiency and support employees? How can they redirect leadership to provide the support those employees need? At the end of the day, organizational intelligence gets data-driven insights to answer all these questions, and much more. 

What is Organizational Behavior?

First thing’s first, what is organizational behavior? Organizational behavior is how individuals interact and behave in groups. It’s especially relevant when looking at the workplace. Forward-thinking businesses take their organizational behavior seriously, because it greatly impacts employee satisfaction and engagement, leadership performance, and overall workplace efficiency and effectiveness. If organizations do not understand their employee behavior, perceptions and opinions, they miss out on insights that could holistically improve their business. The best way to get those opinions, and translate them into a strategic action plan is to leverage organizational intelligence solutions.

Leveraging Organizational Intelligence Experts: Gather Unbiased Data

Who should gather organizational behavior data? Your team is full of subject matter experts on your business and your industry, but when it comes to gathering information on organizational behavior, they may not be the right facilitators. Internal teams will have natural bias and may have subconscious results in mind, and could therefore not ask appropriate, unbiased questions. Plus, when it comes to listening to your employees, you want to get thoughts from a wide range of  team members. That means allocating the task to an outside expert, to increase cooperation by maintaining employee confidentiality. Ultimately, this gives every employee the opportunity to provide their opinions, maintaining employee anonymity while removing all potential bias from the initiative.

Keys to Improving Performance and Commitment in the Workplace

So, what are the keys to improving performance and commitment in the workplace? Understanding what motivates your team members is key to educating and empowering leadership to create a path toward a better future for your company. Get a breakdown on employee insights, leadership development, and strategic planning facilitation below:

• Employee Insights
• Leadership Development
• Strategic Planning Facilitation

Employee Insights

What are the honest opinions of your employees when it comes to your business culture and processes? When leadership asks them directly, they will likely get a much different answer than an unbiased facilitator. However, there are many ways to gather this information from your team. An organizational intelligence expert can identify a custom learning plan based on your business, and implement solutions designed to get the most valuable feedback from employees. According to the Harvard Business Review,

“High-OQ (organizational intelligence) leaders foster an understanding, or ethos, of “who we are.” When leaders move from managing individuals or small groups to leading entire organizations, they need to create a shared understanding of what’s important and what the organization stands for — in other words, an ethos.”

What kind of exercises result in the best employee insights? This varies depending on the organization, but typically it comes down to both qualitative and quantitative research. Some examples of qualitative research include one-on-one interviews, small group employee discussions, and stakeholder interviews. Meanwhile quantitative research looks more like customized online employee engagement surveys targeted to specific employee teams, departments, functions, and regions. Often, employee engagement surveys are administered with regular frequency, e.g., annually or bi-annually, to measure positive or negative changes in employee satisfaction and engagement over time.

Leadership Development

Your industry is constantly changing, your business is growing, and workplace expectations are ever-evolving. Is your leadership adapting to accommodate? Modern businesses must create an expectation for agility in leadership to keep employees engaged and motivated. That means regular leadership training, coaching, and development. Organizational intelligence experts can handle the task and provide tailored, relevant coaching that meets the needs of your leaders. It begins with one-on-one introductory sessions, a 360 degree leadership assessment and follow-up analysis, development planning and coaching sessions with leaders at all levels of the organization - executives, high-potential leaders, and new managers.  This results in more effective leadership and impactful business management that can exceed the expectations of their teams. 

What solutions are involved in leadership development? First, there is leader coaching and education, which can include leadership assessments, feedback, and career planning directly with leaders. This can take place individually or in group/cohort sessions.  There is also team effectiveness training, which helps teams define their purpose, processes, roles and responsibilities, as well as individual contributions. This is especially important for businesses facing restructuring, where new teams are being formed and leadership responsibilities are changing.

Strategic Planning Facilitation

You have so many initiatives in the works – strategic planning can feel like one of those tasks that could easily get pushed down the line. However, strategic planning is the high-level exercise that impacts every other element of your organization. Outsourcing guarantees timely and effective execution, especially when you pick the right partner for the job. Market research firms like SIVO offer comprehensive workshops to ensure your team develops a sound strategic plan that will successfully lead the company into the future.  

These facilitated workshops are especially beneficial to newer businesses or businesses facing large changes, like acquisitions, mergers or a challenging external environment. Knowing how to bring teams together, leveraging critical and inspirational inputs is no small task. That’s why it’s beneficial to have experienced strategic planning facilitators on your side, to plan and facilitate the workshop so that you leave the session with a clearly defined vision, mission, values, plans and ownership assignments. Sessions may also focus on other topics, such as communications planning, insight activation sessions, special-interest group planning, and even competitive SWOT analysis. Regardless of the focus, each strategic planning session will help leaders develop and align on clear strategies for the future, to drive business success.  

Improving Performance and Commitment in the Workplace

No matter the business, every employee wants to be heard. Creating a place for employees to provide their thoughts can only benefit your business. From an employee perspective, these people-focused exercises prove that leadership cares about their opinions and wants to make steps to improve their workplace experience. The same goes for dedicated strategic planning exercises and leadership development. These initiatives create a stronger, people-first organization positioned to succeed. When leaders are effective, employees are motivated, and business strategy is in place, it all adds up to improved performance and commitment in the workplace – and more success in the market. 

Support Your Business with Organizational Intelligence Services

Organizational intelligence services result in game-changing insights that can transform your business for the better – and position you for even more growth down the line. Your team members have the deep knowledge about the company and industry, and often, their perspectives can unlock opportunities that leadership would have never otherwise considered. Once those insights are relayed to leaders with actionable recommendations, you can accomplish so much more within your organization. 

Are you ready to gain insights on your organizational behavior? Get information on every aspect of your organizational behavior with SIVO. Our team of organizational intelligence experts can help you lead your team through any major transition. We work with organizations across industries, and build custom insight solutions that holistically improve performance and commitment in the workplace. 

Contact SIVO today to discuss your business needs and get support. 

by Cindy Blackstock 

At SIVO, our team of insights experts have honed their skills over many years of market research and the lessons gained along the way now prove to be invaluable.  We have learned that insights are just useless facts unless they can be applied to the business in a way that drives action among our client teams and growth on their businesses.  So, in the spirit of sharing useful content and a bit of our “secret sauce” with our valued clients and partners, here are 5 Keys for Turning Consumer Insights into Action.  

Start with the End in Mind 

As market researchers in search of consumer insights, the SIVO team must understand how the results will possibly be used, what actions will be taken by our clients and how our clients intend to influence and have impact in their organization using our research. When we are equipped with the business objective and the actions that might stem from the results, we become clear on the research objectives and design.  We all know that best consumer insights experts can envision how the research results need to come to life before starting the research.  When we do this, we avoid two big pitfalls in research – first, the fatal one, missing a key question and second, the sloppy one, asking questions that don’t need to be answered or are already known. 

Conduct a “Get Smart” Session  

By facilitating a “Get Smart” Session with the client team, SIVO can mine existing information and surface institutional knowledge. There are 3 key reasons for the session:  

• To provide context and grounding to the SIVO experts as they design the learning plan 
• To uncover client team knowledge gaps, a.k.a., figure out what is known and what the client team still needs to learn 
• Level everyone up – the entire client team has the same in-going perspective 

Plan for Quality Input to Get Quality Output 

It has been said that the quality of the output is only as good as the quality of the input.  This is very true when designing market research.  SIVO experts start with detailed learning plans to outline how the business objectives translate to the learning objectives and market research approach.  This is where we align with the client team by defining things like sample composition and size, key measures, and of course, the action standards.  Action standards outline the “if/then” scenarios for research outcomes and the follow-up actions.  For example, if the results indicate X, then the action to be taken is Y. Documenting the action standards, before the research is executed, forces both the SIVO and client teams to think through the possible actions for each hypothesized outcome. 

Report the Key Findings (and, all the rest too!) 

Some client teams want an at-a-glance Executive Summary of results that they can quickly act upon, and others want all the details for a more thorough understanding before taking action.  SIVO provides both, either in one report or in two separate deliverables. We must be clear on the delivery of the topline summary versus the full report with the detailed findings (supporting data, quotes, video clips, images, etc.) for future reference. 

Make Clear Recommendations

It’s critical to turn data into insights and insights into actions. Too often professionals in the insights industry are hesitant to make bold recommendations on potential actions to take. However, client teams are looking for more than data and insights.  They need courageous recommendations that inform their decisions.  To drive action, SIVO puts a stake in the ground!  It is, however, important to point out that recommendations are an educated opinion or point-of-view, based on the insights and findings of the research.  Clients will then use research recommendations, in conjunction with other external factors, to guide or inform their actions and decisions.  The best way to be confident about the recommendations is to circle back to Step 1!  Start with the end in mind! 

Contact the SIVO team at Contact@SIVOInsights.com or reach out to me directly at Cindy.Blackstock@SIVOInsights.com to help you uncover insights that inform your future decisions and actions!