Product & service incubation

Innovation only has value if it’s brought to life. Incubation is the process of taking promising ideas and growing them to the point where they can be released to the marketplace.

Why it Matters

Get to market quickly and efficiently.

The end goal of product and service innovation is driving both user and business value. To do that, product teams must be able to bring their promising new products and services to the market in a way that is rapid enough to capture a market opportunity and efficient enough to provide positive return on investment.

Speed to market

Getting to market quickly is often the difference between product success and failure. So from an incubation standpoint, the goal is to identify and build that “just big enough” product idea—large enough to address users’ needs, but small enough to be delivered quickly.

Resource efficiency

Product incubation must be efficient enough that creating the product makes good business sense. While innovation inherently involves cycles of exploration and iteration, good product incubation makes wise use of hard and soft resources to ensure the product in question meets company financial hurdles.

Market impact

Ultimately, a product must reach its intended users to have the user and business impact it was designed to produce. Good product incubation must enable the product to reach those intended targets so it can produce the desired impacts.

What is a Product Manager, Anyway?

While the exact responsibilities vary from company to company, there are three core components of a product manager’s job: understanding needs, prioritizing work, and motivating...

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How We Can Help

Experience the difference.

At Credera, our core values drive our work, and several of our values come into play when it comes to product incubation. First, creating great products means being people first—specifically, focusing on the user and their needs. Second, tenacity is always required to bring products to life successfully, as there are invariably multiple obstacles to overcome. Finally, our focus on excellence means crafting sound products and services even as we seek to bring them to market quickly and efficiently.

Our approach to product incubation leans heavily on Eric Ries’ Lean Startup methodology—we decide what's worth doing next by building small product increments we can launch, measure, and learn from.

Read about one example of this approach in practice in our work on innovation with a branch of the U.S. military.

In the initial six months of its operation, the innovation lab delivered a total of 183 unique ideas sourced from 15 different channels. From these ideas, the lab successfully produced 10 prototypes, conducted eight prototype tests, and initiated six minimum viable product (MVP) projects.

Jake Carter

Partner and Chief Innovation Officer, Credera

Offerings

Bring products and services to life.

We help our clients build new products and services (and enhance existing ones) to solve real customer problems and drive real-world business results.

Proof of concept and MVP development

Build “just enough” to test the feasibility, desirability, or viability of new products.

Market sizing and modeling

Estimate the market for a new product or service to ensure it's worthwhile to pursue.

Product/market fit assessments

Gauge whether the feature set of a product or service under consideration matches the needs of the market it will serve.

Go-to-market (GTM) planning

Craft robust go-to-market plans to support the launch of new products and services.

Our Experts

Leaders across industry and expertise.

Adopting our people-first style, our team of experts takes a holistic approach to product development and keeps the customer at the center of everything we do.