Designing a product innovation pipeline at one of the world's largest brewers.
Co-designed the framework that translated global consumer trends into prioritized innovation platforms, routed to ZX ventures, AB InBev's Global Brands team, or M&A target screening.
ZX Ventures is the global growth and innovation group inside AB InBev. The remit is to find and back the next generation of beverage brands, sometimes by building them, sometimes by acquiring them, sometimes by routing innovation into AB InBev’s existing global portfolio. The problem is that everything starts with consumer trends, and consumer trends are abundant. The tough question to answer is always which ones to do something about.
I co-led the design of ZX’s Front-End Innovation framework, the company’s process for translating global consumer trends into prioritized innovation platforms. The framework scored opportunities on trend growth, consumer profile fit, and market dynamics (TAM, source of volume, competitive landscape), then routed prioritized opportunities through a portfolio-fit decision tree.
The decision tree had three downstream destinations:
- new ventures inside ZX
- innovation projects inside AB InBev’s existing global brands
- M&A target screening for opportunities where the capability or brand wasn’t yet in the portfolio at all
Most innovation processes treat M&A as a separate discipline that lives elsewhere in the org. By making M&A one of the routes the FEI decision tree explicitly evaluated, the framework forced a build vs buy decision at the same moment the trend was first being assessed.
The framework sat between consumer trend work and corporate development decisions at one of the world’s largest brewers.