The earliest stages of product development are often the most uncertain. Vague ideas, shifting priorities, and competing stakeholder goals can slow progress before it even begins. But this phase isn’t a roadblock—it’s a high-leverage opportunity.

With the right process, early ambiguity can lead to sharper insight, better decisions, and a more resilient direction. That’s what we mean by “defuzzing” the innovation process: uncovering user and technology insights that reframe the problem and reduce risk.

As consultants, we hunt for those insights in two places—user research and technology sweeps—or often, a blend of both. The goal is to find what shifts how we think about the product, the people, or the system that supports it. And that reframing doesn’t just help strategy and design—it sets the stage for smarter engineering decisions, too.

We’ve developed several techniques for defuzzing the innovation process, which we tailor to each client based on product category, market maturity, and available budget. 

Below are three real-world examples that show what this looks like in practice—each one rooted in a different level of innovation ambition.

Scenario #1

“We just want you to innovate. We’re not sure why or where.”

Technique: Expert Interviews

This is probably the fuzziest situation, and consultants typically prescribe extensive ethnographic user research, which can deliver a juicy list of unmet needs for innovators to feast on. But just as often, and especially in mature and saturated categories, you can go off and conduct an intensive research exercise without yielding any true insight epiphanies. Without research insights or problem definition from the client, ideation is an extremely dry exercise — especially when you’re working in a well-established category. We’ve found it useful to do more modest insight-gathering from targeted phone interviews with users who have distinct opinions.

Phone Interviews with Super Users

For a consumer electronics client, we contacted a handful of technology bloggers and spent 45 minutes with each to answer the following: What have you seen in this space? What’s new that excites you? Where do you think this category is going, and what will be relevant in the future?

These certainly weren’t typical users (they were more like super, lead users) and their highly personal responses couldn’t be read as market justification. However, at this stage in the innovation process we were looking for idea catalysts, and this was a cost-effective way of accessing specialized, directional knowledge.

Phone Interviews with Retail and Distribution Contacts

For balance, we conducted similar phone interviews with the same client’s retail and distribution contacts. These experts presented a more conservative perspective on which new products had succeeded or failed in the category and why. We learned where other companies had tried to innovate unsuccessfully and where the underlying user need had remained unsolved. These two sets of diverse insights sparked new product ideas in subsequent brainstorms.

Scenario #2

“We have a specific, well-defined problem to solve, but we’re not sure which design or technology will solve it.”

Technique: Technology Sweep

Sometimes clients will have sought product innovation from other consultancies before coming to us. They may have defined a user need and dreamt their product vision, but technically achieving it is another matter. I’m lucky to be an industrial designer surrounded by diverse engineering expertise with the tools to generate, test, and validate technology-based ideas. Cross-pollination is the advantage here.

Technology Sweep Basics

A technology sweep might be informed by our client’s research, their existing technical strengths, and/or an IP search. It is also informed by our own problem-solving experience and hunches about technologies that could be a great match for the unmet needs of users. The sweep can be general or it can be driven by a specific, desired functionality such as simpler operation, cordless functionality, or a lighter device.

Technology Sweeps in Action

New technologies are often not new at all but more an adaptation of an established technology from one product category to a different one (think of how grain separators inspired the Dyson bagless vacuum). In one client’s case, we started with an in-house sweep for technologies to accurately meter, dilute, and dispense a super concentrated form of household chemical.

One of our engineers pinpointed two technologies — one that’s commonplace in auto carburetors and another that’s common in medical instruments — neither of which had ever been adapted to our client’s product space. Clients can be so immersed in their own industries, it’s difficult for them to see technologies that might lift them up and over their innovation hump.

Scenario #3

“We want to innovate in more categories, but we’re not sure which are a good fit for our brand or where the market opportunities lie.”

Technique: User Research and Technology Sweep (a blend)

When a mid-sized outdoor equipment client was acquired by a larger company, the latter wanted to explore new categories that leveraged the brand and expanded their acquisition’s reach. They approached us with the questions: Where does our brand fit best with consumers?; Where do our retailers and distributors see a natural fit?; Where can we play to our strengths?; What’s the technology roadmap that elevates us from becoming a commodity?

Research Workshops with Brand Devotees

Outdoor enthusiasts tend to be extremely suspicious of excessive brand stretch undermining the quality of their favorite equipment. For that reason, we wanted more direct interaction than an online brand survey so we chose to host a series of research workshops with both brand devotees and brand-aware users. Participants not only reacted to brand fit but also started to build innovative product ideas in categories where they had the most enthusiasm. Strong design attributes and features from the original products transferred into the new.

Phone Interviews with Distributors and Retailers

In parallel we conducted expert phone interviews with outdoor equipment distributors and retailers. The brand’s history was already well-populated with highly innovative but commercially unsuccessful products. The interviews revealed a tangled web of store and Web retailers with unique distribution scenarios in between. We discovered that some new-category commercial relationships were just not strong enough to support interest without significant sales and marketing investment. However other ripe categories were just a stepping stone away from the company’s current established channels.

Intellectual Property (Patent) Search

The new owner brought a broader suite of manufacturing and off-shelf technology capabilities to the brand. We analyzed how each could be leveraged to advantage in new outdoor segments. Could we benefit from lighter and more complex parts?; Would power and electronics leapfrog the competition in some way?; Could high volume processes reduce cost in one area, allowing added sophistication in another? A cursory patent search highlighted not only potential areas of technical infringement but also the density of innovation activity with a product category.

Putting it Together: Five Forces Analysis

As a result of these three activities we derived rankings for new category brand fit, channel strength, and technology synergy. With a nod to ‘Porter’s Five Forces’ analysis, we combined these with scores for external threats to market attractiveness (threat of new entrants, threat of substitute products, and the intensity of the competition). The opportunities for innovation in potential new product categories clearly revealed themselves in a bubble chart as we layered on the relative scores.

From Fuzzy to Feasible

Early-stage innovation is messy by nature—but that doesn’t mean it has to stall. When teams take the time to define the right opportunity, they reduce downstream risk, align faster, and build with purpose.

We’ve seen this approach drive success across a wide range of industries—from connected consumer health to diagnostics and regulated medical devices. Whether the challenge is technical, behavioral, or organizational, the first step is the same: getting clear on what matters and why.

If you’re sitting with an ambiguous idea or a high-stakes innovation question, start by defuzzing it. The clarity you create upfront will shape everything that follows.

Sitting with a complex challenge or fuzzy idea? Let’s talk about how early clarity can shape smarter development—and save time, cost, and risk downstream.

Delve partners with teams at the earliest stages of innovation to define what matters, uncover the right opportunity, and chart a path that leads somewhere real.