76% of new products fail commercially. The leading cause? The problem was never properly understood.
(Cooper, 2017)
Problemsmith is a structured methodology that mines the insight others overlook, shapes it into a problem that holds, and directs creative effort at the right target. Built for organisations determined to build the right thing.
Not with the technology, the timeline, or the budget. Products fail because the problem itself was never properly found, framed, or agreed upon. The symptoms show up everywhere.
Direction gets set by confidence, not evidence. The stronger the conviction, the less likely it is challenged. The real problem never gets defined.
46% of new product development spend goes to products that fail or are cancelled (Cooper, 2017).Every stakeholder has a different understanding of the problem. Nobody surfaces the disagreement. The team builds to competing briefs without realising it.
86% of executives cite lack of collaboration as the primary cause of workplace failures (Fierce Inc., 2011).Engineering, design, commercial, and operations work in parallel but not together. Critical insight stays locked in the department that found it.
57% of project failures trace directly to communication breakdown (Project Management Institute, 2013).Key choices are made in meetings, on calls, in corridors. No record of who decided what or why. When things go wrong, there is nothing to learn from.
Teams waste 20+ hours per month revisiting unrecorded decisions (Pumble, 2024).The highest-paid person's opinion wins. Ideas backed by seniority go unchallenged. The best thinking in the room never makes it to the table.
A widely documented form of authority bias (Kaushik, 2007).Bad ideas survive too long because there is no structured way to evaluate them. By the time the evidence is clear, the investment is already made.
Successful firms invest twice as much in pre-development evaluation (Cooper, 2017)."If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions."
Albert Einstein (attributed)Every failure above traces back to how the problem was handled. Problemsmith replaces assumption with structured evidence, combining proven methodology with advanced technology to make problem definition faster, more rigorous, and free from internal politics.
Great teams have always known that insight comes first. Problemsmith extends their reach, drawing on global markets, emerging research, historical precedent, and perspectives across industries, cultures, and disciplines. It gives teams a richer, more complete landscape of opportunities than any single organisation could assemble alone.
Problemsmith synthesises multimodal data, from market research and technical reports to customer feedback and visual media, surfacing patterns and connections across vast volumes of information. It handles the heavy analysis so design and engineering teams can invest their time where it matters most: applying judgment, taste, and creative expertise to a problem they fully understand.
With a validated need and a clearly forged problem, teams spend less time debating direction and more time doing their most exceptional work. Proven inventive thinking frameworks, built into the platform, accelerate ideation. Human intelligence drives the novel solutions. Problemsmith removes the constraints so your people can do what they do best.
No more corridor agreements or meeting-room amnesia. Every choice, rationale, and objection is captured. When questions come back months later, the reasoning is already there.
Engineering, design, commercial, and leadership work from the same evidence, in the same space. Misalignment surfaces early, before it becomes two competing products built to different briefs.
Ideas are assessed on structured evidence, not who proposed them. Written reasoning levels the room. The best thinking rises, regardless of title or tenure.
Weak ideas are identified before they consume resource. Validation gates are built into the process, not bolted on afterwards. Teams commit budget to problems worth solving.
The organisations that define problems well don't just avoid waste. They outperform. Products built from validated problems reach market faster, because customers pull them in rather than having to be pushed. The top 50 innovators have outpaced the broader market by 3.3 percentage points every year since 2005 (Boston Consulting Group, 2023).
The cost benefits compound at every stage of development. Every pivot avoided at the problem stage eliminates multiples of rework, delayed market entry and R&D cost downstream. Rigorous upfront work pays for itself tenfold (Cooper, 2001).
The effect on teams is just as significant. Aligned people are more motivated. Decisions are faster. Creative energy goes where it matters. Organisations that get this right don't just build better products. They become better at building.
The highest-performing innovators don't spend more. They spend better. PwC's Global Innovation 1000 study found that companies who aligned innovation tightly with business strategy achieved 2.6 times the sales growth and 2.9 times the market capitalisation growth of their peers over five years, while spending a smaller share of revenue on research and development (PwC, 2018).
The advantage is not scale. It is the precision of where investment lands: upstream, before commitment locks in the cost of being wrong.
Relative cost of a change at each stage of new product development. Source: Cooper, R.G., Winning at New Products (Basic Books, 4th ed.); Ulrich, K.T. & Eppinger, S.D., Product Design and Development (McGraw-Hill, 6th ed.).