Accelerating market-ready innovation at Starbucks

Client need

Starbucks sought to differentiate itself in the highly competitive tea market across the Asia-Pacific region. To achieve this, Starbucks needed to foster a culture of innovation, equipping its teams with the tools and collaborative processes to create new tea concepts. Their goal was to develop innovative, market-ready ideas that could appeal to diverse customer preferences and drive brand growth. The challenge was to accelerate the ideation process while ensuring the ideas were both feasible and aligned with customer needs.

Solution

To address this, Starbucks partnered with BTS to design and deliver the 3-day Innovation Tea Summit. This immersive summit guided 28 Starbucks partners from 9 countries through a structured design-thinking process to co-create breakthrough tea concepts. The process included five key stages—defining intent, exploring needs, ideating, refining, and planning small-scale testing. The summit brought these stages to life through the following core activities:

1. Customer understanding and insight gathering: Participants kicked off with a deep dive into customer behaviors, using tools like observation, interviews, and empathy exercises to uncover unmet needs. Teams created detailed customer journey maps, identifying pain points and opportunities, and refined these insights into actionable need statements.
2. Ideation and creative prototyping: Armed with customer insights, participants engaged in creative ideation sessions, generating a large volume of ideas without judgment to maximize bold and unique solutions. These ideas were refined with feedback from peers, industry experts, and product designers. Prototyping activities brought the ideas to life, blending creativity with feasibility through sketches and live demonstrations by mixologists.
3. Experimentation and strategic planning: Participants explored disciplined experimentation techniques to assess the feasibility and desirability of their concepts. Using collaborative brainstorming and structured feedback, they identified next steps for testing their ideas. The summit concluded with team presentations, where participants pitched their innovative concepts and discussed the roadmap for implementation.

This comprehensive process ensured that every idea was customer-centered, innovative, and ready for accelerated market testing.

Results

The summit produced transformative results for Starbucks:

• Over 120 unique ideas: Participants created a diverse set of concepts designed to differentiate Starbucks in the tea market, with many ready for testing and refinement.
• Immediate market readiness: About 70% of the ideas were deemed feasible for testing within 6-12 months, accelerating Starbucks’ innovation timeline.
• Accelerated innovation: Teams left the summit equipped with practical tools and techniques to drive innovation more effectively, enabling them to validate and develop key ideas at a faster pace.
• Sustained engagement: Starbucks committed to ongoing collaboration between R&D and regional teams, equipping participants with a clear, repeatable innovation process to continually refine ideas and develop a pipeline of innovative products.

Testimonials

• “We should conduct more of these if time and resources permit as this is a great way to share ideas and explore and challenge problems in the fastest and most efficient way. Good job to the organizers!”
• “I think this is a great workshop, I’ve learned a lot. Wish there will be this kind of workshop for other functions as well such as operations, marketing, and SCO.”
• “I learned that we must first start with the insight and must refrain from making assumptions that are unfounded. Focus on the need of the customer, not on the product.”

The Innovation Tea Summit not only delivered a suite of exciting new tea ideas for Starbucks but also empowered participants with a repeatable innovation process. This sets the stage for sustained growth, customer-centric differentiation, and ongoing success in the competitive beverage market.