Key takeaways

  • An innovation venture building consultant's core job is to help you find the right problem before you start solving it. Most companies skip this step and pay for it later.
  • The label covers a wide range of actual work: strategy diagnostics, venture building, technology road-mapping, AI integration, EU funding strategy. Ask specifically what the person in front of you actually does day to day.
  • The clearest signal of a good consultant is not their methodology. It is whether they can tell you, with evidence, when their involvement made things worse or did not add value.
  • There are at least four situations where you genuinely do not need a consultant. Knowing which one you are in will save you significant money and time.
  • The engagement model matters as much as the person. A short, bounded diagnostic is almost always more useful than a long, open-ended retainer at the start of a relationship.

A few months ago I spoke with a CEO who had just ended a six-month innovation consulting engagement. She had spent around 80,000 euros and had a thick document full of recommendations. Almost none of them had been implemented. When I asked why, she said: "The recommendations were fine. But we never figured out what we were actually trying to change."

That is the most common failure mode in innovation consulting. Not bad advice. Not incompetent consultants. A fundamental mismatch between what the client needed (clarity on the problem) and what they bought (a solution to a problem that had not yet been defined clearly enough to solve).

This article is an attempt to fix that mismatch by being direct about what the work actually is, when it is worth paying for, and when it is not.

What the work actually looks like

The label "innovation consultant" covers an enormous range of actual activities. Someone who helps corporations run design thinking workshops and someone who structures AI-first ventures from scratch are both called innovation consultants. The difference in what they do day to day is almost total.

Here is how I would break down the most common types of work that fall under the label, and what each actually involves:

Type 1

Strategic diagnostic

A structured process to identify where the real constraints on growth or innovation actually are, as opposed to where the leadership team thinks they are. This involves interviews across the organisation, analysis of existing data and processes, and usually a structured synthesis that distinguishes symptoms from causes. The output is not a list of ideas but a prioritised map of where to focus energy. This is the most valuable type of engagement to run first, and the most commonly skipped.

Type 2

Venture building and new business design

Helping a company identify, design, and validate a new business unit, product line, or standalone venture. This is distinct from strategy consulting in that it involves doing: running discovery research, structuring experiments, building early prototypes or MVPs, and working with the team to test assumptions in the market. The consultant is closer to a co-founder than an advisor in this model. The engagement typically lasts six to eighteen months and involves significant ongoing involvement, not a one-off deliverable.

Type 3

AI and technology integration strategy

Deciding where and how to integrate AI or other new technologies into existing operations or products. This is not implementation (that is what an agency does) but the layer before it: identifying which problems are worth solving with technology, what the right architecture looks like, how to sequence the work, and what the organisation needs to change to absorb it. As covered in more depth in the article on AI strategy: in-house vs expert, this kind of work is most valuable precisely because it happens before any money is spent on building.

Type 4

EU funding and grant strategy

Identifying which European funding instruments are relevant for a company's situation, structuring an application strategy, and in some cases writing or reviewing proposals. This is a niche that requires deep knowledge of specific programmes (Horizon Europe, EIC Accelerator, Eurostars, and others), realistic expectations about timelines and success rates, and an ability to translate technical and commercial plans into the evaluation language those programmes use. The difference between a good and a mediocre application to EIC Accelerator, for example, can be the difference between funding and rejection on criteria that have nothing to do with the quality of the underlying company.

Most consultants do one or two of these well and the others badly. The first question to ask anyone presenting themselves as an innovation consultant is: which of these is the work you actually do most of the time, and can you show me concrete examples?

What a good engagement actually produces

The output of an innovation consulting engagement is almost never just a document. If a consultant hands you a 60-page strategy deck and considers their work done, you have bought the wrong thing.

The most valuable outputs from well-run engagements fall into three categories.

The first is a shared diagnosis: a clear, evidence-backed articulation of what is actually limiting growth or innovation, that the leadership team genuinely agrees with and did not already know before the engagement started. This sounds simple but is surprisingly rare. Most companies have a lot of opinions about their problems and very little evidence. A good consultant forces the evidence into the conversation.

The second is a decision, not a recommendation. The difference matters. A recommendation says "you should do X." A decision says "we have agreed to do X, starting next week, with this person owning it." Consultants who only produce recommendations have transferred the hard work (deciding, committing, assigning ownership) back to the client. Good consulting ends with something in motion, not something in a folder.

The third is capability that stays in the organisation. The consultant should leave the team smarter about the problem than they were before the engagement. If the company cannot function in the area the consultant worked on without the consultant being there, the engagement produced dependency, not value.

A useful test: at the end of an engagement, can the internal team explain the reasoning behind each key decision in their own words? If they can only say "the consultant recommended it," the knowledge transfer failed, and the decisions will not survive the first obstacle without the consultant in the room.

When you genuinely do not need a consultant

This is the part most consultants leave out of their marketing. There are clear situations where hiring one is a waste of money and where you would be better served by something else entirely.

✕

You have a clear execution problem

You know what to build. You have validated the direction. What you need is someone to build it faster or better. In this case, what you need is an operator, an engineer, or an agency, not a consultant. Bringing in strategic thinking at the execution stage slows you down.

✕

You want external validation of a decision already made

If you have already decided what to do and are looking for someone to confirm it, you are not looking for a consultant. You are looking for a yes-person with credentials. The most common version of this is hiring someone to build the case for a strategic pivot that the CEO has already committed to internally.

✕

You are too early to benefit from external structure

In the first few weeks of a genuinely new idea, the most valuable thing is rapid, unstructured experimentation. Bringing in a consultant at this stage often imposes a framework on a situation that needs to stay fluid. Talk to customers, run experiments, get evidence first.

✕

The real problem is internal politics, not strategy

External consultants cannot fix internal alignment problems. If the organisation cannot agree on direction because of leadership conflict or structural incentives, a strategy document will not solve it. The consultant will leave and the conflict will reassert itself. Fix the governance first.

How to evaluate whether someone is actually good at this

The innovation consulting market has very low barriers to entry and almost no external quality signal. There is no certification, no regulated credential, no objective way to compare one person to another from the outside. This means you have to do the evaluation yourself, and doing it well requires asking different questions than most buyers ask.

Most people evaluate consultants by looking at past clients, methodologies presented, and whether the person seems smart in a first meeting. None of these are reliable indicators of whether the engagement will actually produce something useful.

Three questions that work better in practice:

Describe a project that did not go as planned. Good consultants have a real, specific answer to this that includes what they did wrong, what they would do differently, and what they learned. Consultants who pivot to a near-miss framed as a success story are optimising for impression management rather than genuine reflection.

What would you not do in my situation, before you know my situation well? A good consultant will tell you what questions need to be answered before they can recommend anything. They will be clear about what they cannot evaluate from the outside and honest about where the risk of getting it wrong is highest. A bad consultant will immediately begin pitching their approach.

Who would you refer me to if you were not the right fit? Willingness to name specific alternatives, and to actively lose the work to someone better suited, is one of the clearest signals that a consultant is aligned with your outcome rather than their revenue. Most cannot do this. The ones who can are worth talking to longer.

What "innovation strategy consulting" actually means in practice

The phrase gets used to cover everything from corporate workshops to deep technical road-mapping. What it means in a useful sense is this: helping an organisation decide which bets to make on new products, technologies, or business models, and then helping them make those bets in a way that is fast enough to matter and structured enough to learn from.

The emphasis on speed is not incidental. Most large organisations move slowly not because they lack ideas but because every idea gets subjected to the same review process regardless of its risk profile. One of the most concrete things a good innovation consultant does is design a faster path for early-stage ideas: a process that gives them just enough structure to be evaluated without subjecting them to the full institutional overhead before there is any evidence they are worth investing in.

For AI-related innovation specifically, the challenge is slightly different. The technology is moving fast enough that waiting for certainty before acting is itself a strategic risk. The consultant's job in this context is to help the organisation move quickly on the parts where early commitment creates durable advantage, while staying flexible on the parts where the landscape is still shifting. That is a different set of skills from traditional strategy work, and it is worth asking explicitly whether the person you are evaluating has done it in practice, not just in theory.

For the related question of whether to build AI capability in-house or work with an external partner, see the companion piece on AI strategy: build it in-house or bring in an expert? For practical guidance on which processes to automate first, see the guide on AI automation for startups and SMEs.

What this means if you are considering working with Ipernovation

I work primarily in two areas: AI and technology integration strategy (helping companies decide where and how to move on AI, before implementation starts), and venture building (helping companies or founders design and validate new business lines, including EU-funded ventures).

The engagements I find most valuable, and where I think I add the most, start with a short diagnostic: two to four weeks of structured work to identify where the real leverage is, before any broader commitment is made. This protects both sides. It gives the company a concrete output they can act on regardless of what they decide next. And it gives me enough context to know whether a longer engagement would actually be worth it.

If what you need is a framework document, a workshop, or someone to validate a plan you have already made, I am probably not the right fit. If you are trying to figure out what to actually do next, and you want that process to produce something that moves, that is the conversation worth having.

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