How does a legacy incumbent find growth in a market facing structural decline?

A global education services company faced an existential challenge: its core market was contracting, and the consumers that powered it were pursuing alternatives to traditional degrees. We combined exploratory ethnography, a 2,000 respondent survey, and commercial methods (competitive analysis, market sizing, growth model) to identify three high-growth segments, each paired with a specific right to win that leveraged existing client capabilities.

Our work led the client to pivot its corporate strategy, reallocate $XXM in innovation investment, and formally announce the shift to shareholders in their half-yearly SEC filing.

The pressures on the client's core business were structural, not cyclical. Enrollment was in multi-year decline, employers were bypassing degrees as a hiring signal, and alternative providers (bootcamps, creator-led courses, upskilling platforms) were increasingly capturing attention and spend. Growth had to come from new segments but capital constraints and a declining core ruled out greenfield bets.

The question: Where could the client credibly compete for growth given its existing capabilities and a declining core?

Decisions about where to deploy capital required both directional clarity about unmet consumer needs and quantitative, commercial defensibility of an opportunity. We structured the engagement across three phases, moving from exploratory discovery and consumer validation to marketplace analysis and commercial feasibility to identify the best-fit opportunities.

• Phase 1 - Landscape Mapping: Analysis of 200+ emerging education offerings and venture deals over three years, paired with expert interviews to validate macro shifts in the industry, surface emerging category logics, and identify potential M&A targets
• Phase 2 - Emerging Consumer Needs: Ethnographic interviews with early career learners alongside 12+ stakeholder interviews across the client organization surfaced unmet consumer needs alongside internal client capabilities. A 2,000-respondent survey then served to prioritize emerging needs, potential solutions, and willingness-to-pay at statistical scale - identifying three prioritized segments.
• Phase 3 - Commercial Synthesis: For each prioritized segment: product concept development, business model articulation, competitive mapping, right-to-win analysis against the client's existing capabilities, market sizing with TAM and growth projections, and 10-year segmentation model built for leadership teams to track future shifts and ongoing investments.

I led the quantitative and commercial workstreams end-to-end: competitive analysis, survey design and fielding, market sizing, and model development. Ethnographic interviews were conducted collaboratively.

Early career learners weren't rejecting education but rather rejecting linear, exploratory pathways that assess employability at the end. Emerging winners offered cyclical, targeted offerings that began with employment outcomes and enabled repeated upskilling across a career. The implication: compete not by defending the degree, but by becoming a lifelong learning partner across repeated career transitions.

Our work translated into a defensible investment thesis across three prioritized opportunity spaces, each paired with a specific right-to-win and go-to-market hypothesis. We identified three new consumer segments that leveraged the client's existing IP, expertise, and GTM capabilities. For each segment, we delivered product concepts, business model articulation, capability gap analysis, and 10-year financial projections.

The work translated into material consequences:

• Corporate Pivot: The client formally pivoted its corporate strategy in its half-yearly SEC filing, signaling a material shift in its growth thesis to shareholders.
• Capital Reallocation: $XXM in innovation investment was publicly reallocated towards the prioritized opportunity spaces
• Decision Infrastructure: Our models and research served as tools that enabled the team to evaluate new opportunities, track size-of-prize, monitor segment shifts, and make disciplined investment decisions post-engagement.