Product Innovation Strategy

During my year-long internship in Copenhagen, I worked globally across three product categories: headphones, earphones, and portable speakers. My work spanned research, competitive analysis, product ideation and strategic roadmap work. I also helped facilitate strategic foresight workshops with senior leadership exploring future product directions.

This project shows the research programme, analysis and ideation conducted on the portable speaker category, specifically the Beosound A5.

The programme began with a comprehensive secondary research phase structured across internal and external sources, building an evidence base before any primary data was collected.

Secondary research scope

With the secondary research establishing the landscape, I moved into primary data collection across two fronts.

First, I tested competitor products directly, building firsthand understanding of how the category actually felt to use, and where B&O's experience diverged from the competition in practice.

Second, I conducted conversations across key markets with 10 experts, those who observe purchasing behaviour across brands and understood what actually moves product. Their perspective grounded the research in commercial reality rather than user aspiration alone.

These two streams together shaped the hypotheses and uncertainties that defined the subsequent user and design research phase.

The third phase moved into structured user and design research, designed in two stages.

First, an exploratory pilot survey with the aim of testing assumptions, refining question framing, and validating that the research would work at scale. The conclusions from the pilot informed the conclusive research design.

The conclusive phase centred on a survey of 400 customers across six countries, capturing attitudes, values, behaviours and usage contexts at international scale.

Qualitatively, I synthesised the retailer conversations and competitor testing into thematic insights about the category's commercial dynamics and experiential gaps.

Quantitatively, I ran the survey data through R Studio using random forest decision trees and ANOVAs to identify statistically meaningful patterns in how different user groups related to the category and to B&O specifically.

The specific findings and recommendations are confidential under NDA. They were delivered directly to senior leadership and were included in product gates, feeding into roadmap discussions across R&D and design. The project was awarded a 9.7/10 by the Polytechnic University of Madrid.

Deliverables