Strategic
Innovation Services
Develop Your Plan for Strategic
Growth & Impact
… uncover the information that reveals market opportunities
… draw out their team’s creative genius and imagine new solutions
…react to change and develop a cohesive strategy to move the needle
Align partners with leaders to…
Strategic innovation answers critical questions:
Where will growth come from?
What do our constituents really want?
What will differentiate our solutions and make us more magnetic?
What do we need to do differently?
Using a proven process, we accelerate the timeline from Insights to Impact. This means sharpening your understanding of market needs, generating and prioritizing ideas, getting people on the same page, reducing risk with concept testing, and getting measurable results faster.
Strategy Services
Market Research
To learn where to start your strategic planning or innovation project, get a complete and objective report on what’s happening inside and/or outside your organization. Align uses research and stakeholder engagement services, such as focus groups, forums, surveys, market analysis, and customer personas to uncover what stakeholders really think.
Inspire your team, generate and accelerate good ideas with Align-facilitated innovation programs ranging from a one-day event to a 6-month project customized to fit your objectives and desired outcomes.
Idea
Generation
Develop your organization’s playbook for winning with a comprehensive and customized strategic planning project, including research, facilitation, planning, and implementation coaching.
Strategic Planning
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Stakeholder Engagement & Insights
Understanding your audience is key to success, but expert bias and information overload can obscure the insights that reveal new opportunities. Our market research combines stakeholder engagement with industry analysis to reveal actionable opportunities to drive your organization forward.
What to Expect:
Stakeholder mapping and market segmentation
Interviews, surveys, and engaging focus groups
Concept testing to validate and refine ideas
Customer journeys, personas, and target market analysis
Data-driven recommendations as a jumping-off point for better solutions
Deliverables include Customer Profile, Voice of the Customer Report, Community Needs Assessment, Community Benefits Plan,
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Facilitated programs for innovation teams
Your next big idea is within reach, but it needs the right environment to emerge and flourish. Our facilitated innovation programs empower your team to think differently, collaborate effectively, and generate novel and relevant solutions, grounded in market insights. Once you’ve generated a plethora of options, we make sure you walk away with a prioritized portfolio of solutions, big and small, strategic and tactical. With a roadmap for concept refinement and testing, your team will be ready to bring ideas to life more quickly.
What to Expect:
Dynamic workshops to engage your team
Parallel inspirations to provoke creative thinking relevant to your stakeholders and the challenge you’re addressing
Expert facilitation to elicit and balance different voices and personalities, to share, build, and prioritize an array of ideas
Deliverables include Detailed Problem Statement, Concept Portfolio and Innovation Roadmap
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A Playbook for Winning
Is your team making real progress — or just busy? If it’s time for a strategy refresh, we’ve got you. Today, strategic planning is strategic innovation. It’s not a to-do list—it’s a focused plan of high-impact actions that create real value for your stakeholders. A good strategy identifies the biggest ‘bang for the buck,’ and creates a ripple effect of results that achieve your goal. We help teams move from big goals to bold, achievable strategies—with a process that’s holistic, realistic, and measurable.
What to Expect:
Thorough and inclusive stakeholder engagement
Facilitating insights and innovative ideas
Co-creating with your team
Jumpstarting implementation
Deliverables include Strategic Plan, one-page plan, Presentation deck, and visuals
Strategic Innovation Services
You can’t wait for a
eureka moment.
Surprise! Innovation is a structured process
We create the conditions where great ideas are born! Align's proven process guides your team through the 4 I's of Innovation. Your team will learn how to apply innovation techniques and embrace an innovation mindset, enabling them to contribute to a focused and actionable plan for the future.
A Strategy Scorecard
Align’s Strategy Scorecard is a fast, focused tool to easily assess where you are and what to focus on during your strategic planning project.
The scorecard consists of 16 questions to reflect, assess, and prioritize your needs and build shared understanding of areas for improvement. The scorecard gives you a quick way to take inventory of essential factors that impact success, like people, systems, offerings, customers, financial results, and mission.
If you’re getting ready to do strategic planning, use the Strategy Scorecard now to scope out your priority areas and make your process more focused and efficient.