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

intake brief to ranked report

413 → 3

ideas screened to viable ventures

Brief to ranked report6 days

Ideas per cycle413 generated, 82 enriched, 3 viable

Research per cycle24 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: problem space, incumbents, target customer, geographies, strategy, assets, trusted sources
Ran the platform across the full published corpus
Ranked venture and programme ideas, each traceable to source
Ran simulated customer interviews for a target persona to test the reasoning
Ran the follow-up question loop, answers with sources 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

intake brief to ranked 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

Researched seven problem spaces and three moonshot spaces across three domains
Ran 24 reports and 150+ agent runs: sizing, segmentation, trends, competitors, startups, SWOT
Generated 413 ideas, ranked against a client questionnaire on assets, strategy and private parent and subsidiary data
Enriched 82 ideas: competitors, whitespace sizing, features, revenue models, business cases
Ran 5 to 10 simulated interviews per concept on solution-market fit

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+

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 existing value proposition, sizing, target customer, competitors, prototype and roadmap
Isolated what the proposition claimed, and to whom
Ran customer discovery interviews on desirability, not feasibility
Mapped every touchpoint to find friction before build
Delivered a separate readout to each of the three business owners

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

fund-or-stop answer before 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 across the parent and its business units
Taught the customer-development process with worked examples from live projects
Covered early-adopter recruitment, customer profiling and qualification, and measuring success before revenue
Established a shared vocabulary between the innovation function and operating units
Gave named individuals platform access for their own research

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 validating without a vendor

What it proved

Two functions in the same group commissioned five workstreams. A six-question brief became a ranked opportunity report in six days. The concept sprint ran seven problem spaces, 24 reports, 150+ agent runs and 15,000-plus sources into 413 ideas, 82 enriched concepts and three argued ventures in six weeks. The validation sprint answered a desirability question in four weeks, before alpha build funding. A build plan was scoped and handed over, documented and runnable.

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

Results

Metric	Benchmark	Result	Improvement
Research cycle per space	4 months, client-stated	6 weeks	2.9× faster
Brief to ranked report	Weeks of desk research	6 days	Same-week turnaround
Ideas generated per cycle	50–100 agreed scope	413	4.1–8.3× scope
Opportunity areas explored	5 agreed scope	10 (7 problem, 3 moonshot)	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.