Cutting a four-month research cycle to six weeks across five validation workstreams

Client

Date

$25B+ US energy & home-services company

08/2026

The challenge

A $25B+ US power company and its home-services subsidiary wanted to open new categories on both sides of the meter, and had the mandate but not the research bench. A single cycle into a new opportunity space took the company about four months, so most opportunities never got tested.

The solution

FifthRow ran the Market-to-Concept Engine and its venture-building extension as five separate workstreams, commissioned by two different functions inside the same group. A market space goes in; ranked, enriched and evidence-backed concepts come out, with the research trail attached to every claim so an internal sponsor can defend it.

6 days

from intake brief to a ranked opportunity report

413 → 3

ideas screened to viable ventures

Intake brief to a ranked opportunity report6 days

Venture ideas per concept cycle413 generated, 82 enriched, 3 viable

Research behind one concept cycle24 structured reports, 150+ agent runs, 15,000+ sources

01 — RAPID OPPORTUNITY ASSESSMENT

The corporate strategy team had a live commercial problem: the customer segments it wanted to reach with a new programme behaved in completely opposite ways, and nobody could say which value proposition would actually drive take-up. FifthRow ran a proof of concept to answer it from a six-question brief.

Core Activities

Took a six-question intake covering the problem space, the incumbents, the target customer, the geographies, the company's own strategy and assets, and the public data sources the client trusted
Ran the platform across the full published corpus for the space, synthesising market research and raw sources into one evidence base
Generated and scored a ranked set of venture and programme ideas, each traceable to the sources behind it
Included simulated customer interviews for a target persona so the team could see how the reasoning behind each idea held up
Ran the follow-up question loop directly against the research, so any answer the client wanted came back with its source attached

The Results

A ranked opportunity report the client's team read and re-cut into four strategic themes of their own, two of which were taken forward for deeper exploration. The report also surfaced something the client acted on directly, that the scores across the set were almost flat, which told them the space was not yet differentiated enough to pick a winner on evidence alone.

6 days

from intake brief to a ranked opportunity report

02 — MARKET-TO-CONCEPT SPRINT

The consumer subsidiary wanted to know what to build next in the category it already sells into. FifthRow ran a six-week concept sprint across three market segments, taking the space from open question to three fully argued ventures.

Core Activities

Defined and researched seven problem spaces plus three moonshot spaces across three domains inside that category
Ran 24 structured research reports and more than 150 agent runs across market sizing, segmentation, trends, competitors, startups and SWOT
Generated 413 high-level venture ideas, then ranked them against a client-completed questionnaire on the company's own assets and strategy, plus private data from both the parent and the subsidiary
Enriched 82 ideas with competitor analysis, whitespace sizing, feature sets, revenue models and high-level business cases
Ran 5 to 10 simulated customer interviews per shortlisted concept to pressure-test solution-market fit before any real-world spend

The Results

Three viable ventures with top features, customer insight, competitive landscape and business case, plus four further concepts held as future ventures. Each of the three carried a different recommended next step: prototype and beta testing for one, microsite demand testing for the second, and internal user interviews for the third. The whole body of work, from problem-space discovery to final concepts, was handed over as a single consolidated package of decks, product strategy documents and the underlying research reports, cleared for the client to circulate internally.

15,000+

data sources analysed in six weeks

03 — PRE-BUILD DEMAND VALIDATION

Three separate commercial questions ran through the same year: whether a business-facing platform product was wanted before its alpha build was funded, whether a new route to market held up, and whether a consumer service proposition had a customer. Each got its own short, self-contained validation and its own readout.

Core Activities

Audited the product's existing value proposition, market sizing, target-customer definition, competitive analysis, prototype and product roadmap
Isolated what the value proposition was actually claiming, and to whom
Conducted customer discovery interviews focused strictly on desirability, not feasibility
Mapped the customer journey across every touchpoint to locate friction before it was built into the product
Delivered a separate final readout to the business owner behind each of the three propositions, with the findings written up for internal circulation

The Results

A customer-desirability insight report and an audit of the validation work already done, delivered before alpha-build capital was committed, plus two further delivered readouts in the same year to different sponsors inside the group. Four weeks, three separate readouts, and a decision each sponsor could defend either way.

4 weeks

to a fund-or-stop answer, ahead of the build

04 — INNOVATION ENABLEMENT

Alongside the delivery work, the company commissioned training so its own innovation, incubation and business-unit teams could run the same customer-development and validation methods without a vendor in the room.

Core Activities

Ran multi-day innovation training for internal teams across the parent and its business units
Taught the customer-development process the delivery workstreams used, with worked examples from live projects
Covered early-adopter recruitment, initial customer profiling and qualification, and how to define and measure success on a new venture before revenue exists
Established a shared vocabulary between the corporate innovation function and the operating units it works with
Gave named individuals direct platform access so they could run their own opportunity research between engagements

The Results

Internal teams able to run problem-space definition, customer discovery and early-adopter qualification themselves, and to read and challenge the outputs of the delivery workstreams rather than receive them. Individual analysts began commissioning their own research runs directly, outside any engagement.

internal functions running the validation methods without a vendor in the room

What it proved

Two separate functions inside the same group commissioned five distinct workstreams. A six-question brief became a ranked opportunity report in six days. The concept sprint took an open market space through seven problem spaces, 24 research reports, more than 150 agent runs and 15,000-plus sources to 413 ideas, 82 enriched concepts and three fully argued ventures in six weeks. The validation sprint answered a desirability question in four weeks, before an alpha build was funded. A complete build plan was scoped and then handed to the client's own people as a documented, runnable approach.

What the company was left holding was a decision it could defend at every gate, and the evidence to defend it with. Concepts arrived with business cases, competitive landscapes and internal pitch decks, so sponsors could sell them upward without commissioning a second round of work. Where the company decided the work belonged internally, it got a handover rather than an argument, and came back to commission three more workstreams afterwards. The research cycle that used to take a quarter now takes six weeks, and the first cut of it takes under a week.

Results

MetricBenchmarkResultImprovement

Research cycle for a new opportunity space

Benchmark: 4 months, stated by the clientResult: 6 weeks

2.9× faster

Intake brief to ranked opportunity report

Benchmark: Weeks of internal desk researchResult: 6 days

Same-week turnaround

Venture ideas generated per cycle

Benchmark: 50–100, the agreed scopeResult: 413

4.1–8.3× scope

Opportunity areas explored

Benchmark: 5, the agreed scopeResult: 10 (7 problem spaces plus 3 moonshot spaces)

2× scope

RANKED SHORTLISTING

Ideas are ranked against the company's own assets, strategy and private data, so survivors are defensible to a sponsor who was never in the room.

TRACEABLE CLAIMS

Every claim carries the source behind it and the corpus stays open to questioning, so externally assembled research can be defended internally.

PITCH-READY CONCEPTS

Validated concepts arrive with the artefact needed to sell them internally, so a concept that tests well externally is not lost inside the organisation.

PRE-BUILD VALIDATION

Desirability is tested before build capital is committed, so a fund-or-stop answer arrives while stopping is still cheap.

PORTABLE METHOD

The approach transfers as documentation and training the client's own teams can run, so the capability continues without an external team present.