Ignite, part of Kearney’s Innovate network, accelerates your business growth by examining and pursuing commercial challenges and unique opportunities from your customers’ perspective. Then, from the ground up, we build fully operational business concepts often integrated with your business to leverage what you do well.


Ignite’s most impactful engagements focus on launching new businesses that impact the bottom line: sustainably, drawing on the combined power of all three of our customer excellence disciplines—Inspire, Imagine, and Empower—delivered as a fully integrated offering we call Forge.

Forge: Launch new businesses that impact the top and bottom lines, sustainably.
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Through the Forge capability, we achieve growth by envisioning, designing, and building customer-centric lines of business that are distinct and scalable yet aligned with your core business.

Our design-build-run teams, supported by our global ecosystem of build partners, join forces with your leadership to conceive and launch real businesses that generate meaningful revenue within 18 months from start to scale. We do this in partnership with dedicated client teams or by independently building a fully operational and turnkey business that we transfer back to you.

Forge teams can include growth marketers, brand builders, subject matter experts, product owners, program and project managers, designers, technologists, data engineers, platform specialists, and systems integrators.

 

Inspire: Discover the full potential of your customer value chain, and translate it into concrete commercial opportunities.
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Drawing inspiration from customers whom we deeply understand and empathize with is both an art and a science. Our Inspire capability accelerates the speed by which we

  • Learn what matters most to our current and future customers 
  • Uncover customers’ needs, wants, hopes, and expectations—latent and expressed

One of Inspire’s main differentiators is how we connect insights to concrete commercial opportunities. We achieve this through integrated and advanced qualitative and quantitative research—along with proprietary methods such as customer value segmentation and sentiment hotspot analytics.

 

 

Imagine: Create a winning proposition—differentiated offerings and a signature customer experience that is linked to your organization’s authentic purpose.
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Customer relationships are sustained by an enduring brand proposition, differentiated offerings, and a signature customer experience that set your offerings apart from the alternatives.

Imagine is our proposition and experience design capability that enhances, expands, and sustains the value you create for, and with, your customers. Our recommendations ensure that your return on investment in customer innovation is maximized.

To do this, we implement proprietary design-and-refine methodologies such as LiveLab to shape entirely new business concepts, drive near-term growth, and ladder up to a future vision. After stress-testing these against our reference library of business design architectures, we then formulate distinctive brand and go-to-market strategies.

 

 

Empower: Make your teams fully capable of continuously delivering customer-inspired innovation and growth.
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Bringing a winning product and experience to market takes much more than great vision and design. It requires business-building prowess, which is the focus of our Empower platform. We help you:

  • Champion the change by lifting your teams and their ways of working, particularly your middle managers
  • Foster powerful partnerships to complement your internal capabilities
  • Ensure your technology stack and infrastructure are future-proofed against present and foreseeable challenges
  • Integrate new business lines into your existing corporate architecture

 

Our Design Studio is where our proprietary tools, methodologies, and capabilities are nurtured and honed, for use by our people, and yours.

Design Studio: a center of customer-centric design
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Our in-house Ignite Design Studio, along with a network of our external collaborators, is here to help you rapidly bring concepts to life. 

Our adaptive design approach recognizes that:

  • Customer needs and wants are always in flux.
  • Shifting trends are constantly revealing new possibilities.
  • Competitors never rest.
  • The design process should never end.

By recognizing great design as inherently responsive and dynamic—and by developing your people’s ability to harness this energy—IGNITE Design Studio equips you with the power to sense change, see opportunity, and adapt in real time. Our nontraditional design services—and design training—equip you with the ability to pivot rapidly in service of your customers.

Interested in joining our team? Reach out to us to find out more about our job openings and internship opportunities.

Our partner ecosystem

We collaborate with our highly curated partner ecosystem to provide our clients best qualitative and quantitative customer research, big data and advanced analytics, customer experience AI, cloud and connectivity, business building, brand and marketing capabilities.