Background

Facing pressure to evolve from a traditional product-sales model to a high-margin, software-based subscription model, the company needed to create a business structure that allowed for reinvestment and future growth. Global competitors had already built strong positions, and catching up required proactive new business creation.

Company-Wide Challenge

While the company began developing systems and culture for new business creation, it remained difficult to instill the necessary mindset—especially when success metrics weren’t based on revenue or profit. This made it hard to gain internal support for innovation efforts.

Mission of the Innovation Team

In response to a company-wide digital transformation push, a new innovation team was established to lead initiatives across business units. As a first step, the team was expected to create a successful internal prototype project to serve as proof of concept and gain organizational credibility.

Why They Chose Us

The client chose Peetslist as a partner not just for strategic advice, but for hands-on collaboration. They needed a team that could work side-by-side with their own staff—from idea generation and customer interviews to hypothesis testing—and instill a startup-like mindset in the process.

“Unlike the conceptual proposals we used to make, speaking with real customers helped us understand exactly what we needed to build.”

“We realized that new business development isn’t about flashy pitch decks—it’s about testing assumptions and learning fast.”
- Customer

Our Approach

Rather than simply providing slides or strategy documents, we joined the project as a full member of the team. We conducted field interviews with potential customers at locations like Akihabara and Tokyo Station. Together with the client, we designed hypotheses, ran quick validation cycles, and built decision-making processes. Importantly, we introduced behavior-based KPIs appropriate for the exploration phase, such as number of hypotheses tested and number of customer interviews, rather than relying on traditional metrics like revenue.

Result

The team conducted over 50 times more hypothesis validations and customer interviews than initially planned. Their work became a visible symbol of innovation in action, earning internal trust. The KPIs developed in this initiative are now being adopted company-wide as a new standard for early-stage innovation. For the team members, engaging directly with customers changed their mindset—it was no longer about desk-bound planning, but learning through doing.