Innovation Management: From Idea to Market-Ready Product

Innovation consulting — depending on the provider also called innovation management consulting, and the person doing the work an innovation consultant, an innovation management consultant or simply an innovation manager — works on the question of why ideas do not turn into products, and on the specific point where the path actually stalls. Search fields, evaluation criteria, decision points and ownership of new projects are its subject. The creative work stays in the house: market knowledge, technical depth and closeness to the customer sit where they are used every day.

It first names the bottleneck. The path from idea to product has three bottlenecks in sequence: too few usable ideas, no decision on the ones that exist, and no capacity for the ones that were chosen. In most companies exactly one of them is the real constraint — and it is rarely the first. Running an ideas campaign while two hundred unevaluated proposals sit in a spreadsheet only postpones the problem.

It makes the evaluation reviewable. Projects seldom fail on the quality of the idea; they fail on missing criteria: who decides, on what basis, with what budget, by when. A sound evaluation keeps market assumption, technical feasibility and economics apart instead of blending them into one impression, and it names the assumption that has to hold before more money is committed.

It keeps the path to market open. Between a confirmed concept and a market-ready product sit prototype, manufacturability, regulatory approval, price and a sales force that has to be able to explain the new thing. This is where projects lose their effect: responsibility moves into the line organization, and nobody there was waiting for it.

What it does not do. It does not replace a portfolio decision by management: what share of revenue should come from new products in future is a question for the owners. It does not replace a development department either — engineering, software and regulatory approval stay with your functional areas or a contracted partner. And it does not answer how a business scales into new markets; that belongs to growth strategy and follows a different logic.

In this field the daily rate depends less on the subject than on the responsibility someone carries. The ranges below come from the profiles in our network under Strategy & Management Consulting and apply to independent experts and interim managers — not to the fees of classic management consultancies.

What sets the daily rate. Specialist work without a leadership mandate mostly sits between €600 and €1,600 per day: a Freelance Innovation Manager is listed at €800–1,400, a Freelance Strategy Consultant at €900–1,600, a Freelance Startup Advisor at €600–1,200 and a Freelance Scale-up Consultant at €800–1,400. Once leadership responsibility is added, the range moves up markedly: Interim COO €1,500–2,300, Interim Managing Director €1,500–2,400, Interim CEO €1,600–2,500; a Freelance Executive Coach is listed at €1,000–2,000. Within a band four things decide: industry experience, because otherwise approval routes and development cycles have to be learned first; the number of interfaces, because coordination costs time; the decision-making authority required; and urgency, because availability at short notice is a value in itself.

How a budget is planned. The daily rate alone says little — what counts is the workload. Building an innovation process usually runs part-time at about two days a week; a mandate with leadership responsibility, by contrast, is full-time. Two days a week over a quarter comes to roughly 26 days on site: at €1,100 per day that is about €29,000, a figure that can be weighed against the expected benefit before anything is commissioned. It is worth cutting the budget at the decision points: one amount up to the evaluation, a second up to the confirmed concept, a third up to implementation. That way a decision is taken again after every gate instead of once at the start for the whole sum.

Where we differ from a classic consultancy. The difference lies less in the daily rate than in the model: there a multi-level team works on the project, part of it learning on it, and the overhead is priced in. With us there is a contract with the person who does the work — no hierarchy above it, no share of licence or implementation revenue. In return a single person does not bring a back office or a parallel research unit; where that is needed, we staff several profiles at once.