Control your innovation pipeline – or the market will control you

In today’s hyper-competitive and unpredictable markets, many companies find themselves reacting to trends rather than shaping them. When you lose control of your innovation pipeline, consumer demand, competitors, and external shocks start dictating your innovation agenda. The result? Missed opportunities, wasted resources, and products that fail to resonate.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. With the right structure, insights, and tools, you can build a controlled, collaborative innovation pipeline—one that allows you to lead the market, not follow it.

Why controlling the innovation pipeline matters

• Prevent reactive innovation. Without a structured process, teams jump on short-term fads instead of building strategically aligned innovations.
• Avoid resource waste. Too many organizations spend heavily on ideas that fails, because they weren’t tested and validated early.
• Create competitive advantage. Companies that combine creative freedom with disciplined evaluation outperform those that either stifle innovation or let chaos reign.

Building a robust innovation pipeline

1. Establish a structured process (Stage-gate thinking)

A staged model with clear go/pivot/stop decisions ensures only the ideas with true market potential progress. Give clear mandates to key stakeholders in the process

2. Balance your innovation portfolio (70–20–10 rule)

Innovation is all about managing risk. One way to balance risk meanwhile prevent stagnation is to divide the innovation portfolio into 70% incremental improvements, 20% adjacent innovations, and 10% disruptive bets.

3. Enable transparency across the organization

Ideas shouldn’t vanish into spreadsheets or silos. Collaborative platforms help collect, filter, and track ideas across teams, making innovation visible and accountable.

4. Evaluate early and continuously

By surfacing unknowns early, teams can identify which ideas merit investment and which should be stopped before they drain resources.

5. Work data-driven from start to finish

Innovation shouldn’t rely on gut feeling alone. From the earliest stages of idea intake through development, validation, and final go-to-market, every step benefits from structured data and insights.

Innovation shouldn’t rely on gut feeling alone. From the earliest stages of idea intake through conceptualisation, development, and final go-to-market, every step benefits from structured data and insights.

Where most pipelines break down

Even with processes in place, many companies struggle with three big gaps:

1. Consumer connection – They fail to validate whether consumers truly want the product.
2. Trend foresight – They miss signals of where the market is headed, launching products already past the peak.
3. Decision support – They lack data-driven tools to prioritize and select ideas objectively.

This is where TasteForge.ai comes in.

How TasteForge.ai strengthens your innovation pipeline

TasteForge.ai is a collaborative, learning platform designed specifically for the FMCG and CPG industry to bring structure, intelligence, and foresight into your innovation pipeline. Here’s how:

• Collaborative ecosystem. Teams, partners, and stakeholders can work together on shared innovation projects, turning fragmented data and brainstorming into structured, transparent workflows.
• Feedback loops & Learning system. The platform continuously improves as more projects run through it, creating an evolving knowledge base of consumer preferences, competitive moves, and retail dynamics.
• Trend prediction insights. AI models analyze vast datasets—from consumer conversations to category reports—to detect weak signals and predict where trends are heading. This helps you build for tomorrow, not yesterday.
  • Pattern recognition across categories. Beyond spotting isolated signals, the system uncovers hidden relationships between consumer behaviors, product attributes, and cultural shifts. By connecting dots that aren’t obvious on the surface, it highlights new opportunity spaces—emerging needs and cross-category ideas that traditional analysis would miss.
• Decision support for product-market fit. By scoring concepts against seven key dimensions (team, consumer fit, retail fit, market fit, feasibility, product strength, competitor landscape), TasteForge.ai provides a quantified product concept score (0–100). This makes it easier to select the most promising ideas and pivot early when necessary.

and much more..

Together, these capabilities ensure your pipeline isn’t just full of innovations & ideas—it’s full of the right validated innovations with the highest chance of success in market. Work datadriven from the fuzzy front end to shelf ready products with continuous feedback loops for self-enforced learning through TasteForge AI.

Why now?

Companies are waking up to the reality: innovation without discipline is no longer sustainable.

Those who invest in structured, data-driven, collaborative innovation processes will gain the speed and confidence to bring products to market that consumers actually want—and want now.

Our conclusion & call to action

You can either control your innovation pipeline—or let the market control you. The difference is whether your innovation process is intentional, collaborative, transparent, and insight-driven.

TasteForge.ai is built to give you that control: collaborative tools, AI-powered trend prediction, and decision support that ensures your pipeline consistently produces products with optimal market fit.

In sum: Validate, design, collaborate and launch winning FMCG products faster with reduced risk, R&D cost and time to market with increased product-to-market-fit

Ready to take control of your innovation pipeline? Explore how TasteForge.ai can help your team turn data into winning products.

Author: Merete Helgesen Bognar -Advisory Board member & shareholder TasteForge and founder iCreative

About the author: Merete has more than 25 years of experience in innovation and brand building. She holds a Master of Science in Business (Siviløkonom) with a specialization in marketing from BI Norwegian Business School

She has worked with a wide range of well-known brands both as a client and as a consultant. With extensive experience in innovation, she has been responsible for carrying out several hundred innovation projects.