Retail Data Innovation Lab

Identify, validate, then deliver solutions for driving retail data innovation — all within time-boxed cycles.

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Stand up an in-house innovation lab

Stagnant innovation in the retail space commonly happens for at least one of these reasons: lack of business alignment, unclear strategy and metrics, the wrong team, or siloed resources and budgets. In-house innovation labs help accelerate innovation by creating micro-use cases, then building solutions to solve them.

In our retail data lab engagement, we’ll build out a process and a framework, then work alongside our clients to innovate – showing you the ropes as we build scalable solutions and help your internal teams become self-sufficient.

Our clients include
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Sam's Club logo
Tyson logo
Maersk logoVisionworks logoChick-fil-a logo

Cracking the Code for Data Innovation that Actually Works

How to avoid common pitfalls and ensure your initiatives deliver value, fast.

View Guide →

You may need this if…

  • You need to improve data-driven decision making across your organization
  • You need to prioritize cross-functional data initiatives to get to ROI faster
  • You need added connection between corporate and customer-facing teams
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Interested in setting up your own data lab?

How we can help

We’ll stand up a cross-functional team, either embedded or fully independent, within your organization to vet and execute ideas for innovating with your data. With our innovation frameworks, you’ll get to data ROI faster.

Embedded strategic team that will teach + do
Repeatable frameworks for standing up new initiatives
Functional prototypes with roadmaps 
Ongoing executional support

How each innovation cycle will work:

01 Identify a retail data innovation opportunity

We’ll start by taking a look at use cases for driving retail innovation through a series of discovery workshops. Whether you already have an idea in mind, or need help uncovering an opportunity, our strategy team can help you identify and prioritize an innovation initiative. Whether it's surfacing recommendations to employees on the floor, a new way of looking at predictive financial data, creating a visibility tool for your supply chain, or anything else — we'll help your team sort and prioritize the right projects to make an impact.

02 Pilot & gain buy-in

Depending on the identified opportunity, we will then map out a strategy for testing. Our teams use agile frameworks to build a small experiment to test our theory, be it a prototype, pilot AI model, or something else. Once we prove out the innovation model, we’ll help you “sell” the idea to the rest of your organization.

03 Rollout & iteration

Once we get the greenlight and have a proven model, we’ll build out the first iteration of the initiative. Working closely with anyone affected, we have proven ways of gaining buy-in along our build process, so change management isn’t a painful afterthought.

Data Innovation Lab FAQs 

What is a retail data innovation lab? 


An innovation lab (also known as accelerators, innovation spaces, incubators, or research hubs) is typically a dedicated team, space, and budget focused on accelerating new retail products, understanding market trends, and developing solutions for users — either internally or end consumers. We apply that same concept to data: working with our clients to uncover new ways of leveraging their existing data, prototype concepts for innovative retail software products, and prioritizing data initiatives.

What can I expect from the data innovation lab process?

We start every project with a workshop, what we call a Go! Sprint, where we’ll identify a vision for the lab and define the core problems your organization is facing — then put together a proposal for continued engagement.

From there, we typically work as a retained team for innovation labs. We’ll work with you to build a cross-functional team (usually including representatives from operations, tech, and data) to own the innovation lab within the organization. Integrating with the team, we will establish ways of working and frameworks to ideate, vet, and build data innovation solutions to give you a competitive edge and drive change, faster.

How long is an innovation lab?

It will take us about 3 months to get the lab practice established. From there, we recommend at least a year of our team integrating with yours — so we can tailor the ways of working to your team and transfer any knowledge or skills needed to make sure the lab provides value into the future.

Still have questions? Shoot us a message. Let's chat →

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