Ordnance Survey
Defining growth opportunities to unlock the future of geospatial insights
The Challenge
The geospatial landscape is evolving rapidly, moving beyond traditional GIS (Geographic Information Systems)-centric applications toward integrated spatial insight.
These market shifts created an innovation opportunity for Ordnance Survey to drive growth not only by increasing its share of existing markets, but by unlocking new location-based insights to address emerging customer challenges. By embedding customer needs at the core of product development, Ordnance Survey (OS) could safeguard its leadership in geospatial data while expanding the overall market in Great Britain.
OS had recently formed a Markets Team tasked with assessing growth opportunities. While broad growth areas had been identified, the challenge was to translate these into specific, high-priority opportunities grounded in the most pressing customer needs.
To succeed, they needed:
- Confidence that the prioritised opportunities were the most important for customers
- A clear process for exploring new growth areas and how this could feed into their new product development (NPD) framework
- Organisational alignment and stakeholder buy-in to prioritise opportunities effectively
OS partnered with Cognosis for our rigorous methodology in business model innovation combined with our ability to bring deep customer insight and innovative approaches.
Together, we set out with two priorities:
1. Validate & identify the most promising growth opportunities.
2. Secure organisational alignment behind these opportunities to ensure adoption and impact.
Cognosis brought real clarity to a complex challenge. Their process cut through the noise and helped us focus on the opportunities that matter most. The combination of customer interviews, synthetic testing, and a disciplined DVF framework gave us the confidence to prioritise and act. We now have a clear direction for growth in our priority markets, and a solid rationale for where to pause. It’s been a genuinely valuable partnership.
Bradley Taylor
Director of Strategy & Development
Our Approach
We partnered with OS to bring clarity and confidence to their growth strategy, combining deep market analysis, customer engagement, and advanced insight techniques. Our work began with a comprehensive assessment of priority sectors and growth areas to uncover the external forces shaping opportunity. Through extensive customer interviews, we identified unmet needs and validated assumptions - enriching this understanding with synthetic AI-generated customer intelligence to reveal blind spots and strengthen confidence in the findings.
Collaboration was central throughout. Cross-functional workshops brought together stakeholders from across OS to challenge thinking, refine opportunities, and align on the most promising paths forward. Using the DVF framework, we prioritised opportunities with the greatest strategic and commercial potential, embedding a repeatable, evidence-based process for future innovation.
The Impact
The project gave OS a clear, customer-led roadmap for growth. Through a structured and collaborative process, the team identified and prioritised the most promising market opportunities, grounded in real customer needs rather than internal assumptions.
The outcome was organisational alignment around a shared set of priorities, strengthened by practical frameworks - now embedded in OS’s approach to innovation. This has equipped the Markets team with a scalable, evidence-based way to unlock new insights and direct resources where they will create the greatest impact, accelerating both innovation and market expansion.
