Audrey Holocheris president and founder of storied research inc. Holocher’s professional experience is multi-storied. She draws from the fields of narrative consulting, qualitative market research, branding, advertising, and the social, physical and life sciences. In her work as a consultant to branding and advertising agencies, she has worked with numerous Fortune 500 companies. Her industry experience includes food and beverage, pharmaceutical, healthcare, medical device technology, insurance, financial, retail, automotive, home improvement and energy and power. She’s worked extensively on the side of consumer insights, ideation and brainstorming, and leverages this experience with organizations interested in optimizing innovation execution. Holocher has a certificate in narrative consulting from Kenwood Center, MN, A master’s practitioner certification in neuro linguistic programming from NLP Institute of Chicago, an MS in environmental science and engineering, from Oregon Graduate Institute (now OHSU) and a BS in food science and technology from the University of Washington.
 
 
Health E-Insights: What is storied research?
 
Ms. Holocher: A highly specialized research consultancy that works with food, beverage, nutrition and pharma-nutrition industry leaders to identify and optimize innovation execution best practices.Innovation is the key to survival, so not executing optimally is a real threat to organizations in terms of remaining competitive, viable and profitable.Identifying the best practices that drive execution is critical to increasing the productivity of innovation teams, and to building, maintaining and fostering a sustainable competitive advantage. We help innovation teams understand what’s worked well in the past and what’s working well right now to help move them beyond ideation to more successful execution.
 
 
Health E-Insights: What is your competitive advantage?
 
Ms. Holocher:Using narrative consulting and qualitative research methodologies, we identify and deliver a unique set of innovation execution best practices specific to innovation teams working in the food, beverage, nutrition and pharma-nutrition industries. The best practices that emerge from the research are cross referenced to an existing NPD funnel, StageGate® or other internal process to assess alignments, gaps and opportunities for optimization. At a more granular level, the best practices are referenced against a current innovation initiative to assess optimization opportunities. And, if no innovation process is in place, our work would contribute to its development. A tangible set of best practices helps to demonstrate the innovation team’s value to C-level executives, and to support efforts to align innovation and core business visions. The practices can also be replicated in future ventures to create a sustainable competitive advantage.
 
 
Health E-Insights: Are supplement companies open to an innovation business approach?
 
Ms. Holocher: An innovative business approach could be interpreted in many different ways. Specifically, I’m interested in how the supplement industry will position itself to take advantage of the trends toward natural, whole, clean and simple foods. I’ve watched these trends develop over the years through my work in consumer insights and branding with F500 CPGs and health and wellness-focused grocery store chains, and I believe supplement companies that are the most open to developing innovative new products and delivery systems will find ways to effectively tie into these trends.
 
 
Health E-Insights: Does technology play a big part of what you do?
 
Ms. Holocher: We are a research consultancy, so our work is focused on capturing the unique practices that influence innovation team performance when it’s at its best. If a specific technology drove an innovation execution success, then a question might be how our work could help an organization with a new or different initiative that doesn’t depend on that technology. The answer is that the day-to-day, in the trenches dynamics of the innovation team in terms of actions, behaviors, beliefs and visions are the less tangible influencers to success and failure than a specific new technology. Many organizations already know how to assess and discuss problems, yet do not have any defined means to extract and make tangible what’s working when it comes to successful execution, so completing that picture is critical.

Health E-Insights: What excites you the most about your firm?
 
Ms. Holocher: storied research inc.’s innovation optimization initiative launched this year, and seeing it come to fruition is very exciting. We also look forward to providing an annual Innovation Execution Best Practices Benchmarking Study to the functional food industry. The functional food industry is highly innovative and has the power to do good. So helping our clients to execute on nutrition-focused innovations is motivating. Working with organizations and their external partners in the pharma-nutrition space is of special interest, so I’m keeping a close watch on CPG-pharmaceutical ventures.
 
 
Health E-Insights: To date, what is your proudest career achievement?
 
Ms. Holocher: My certification in narrative consulting. My own open innovation venture was to step outside the field of qualitative research to source cutting-edge story elicitation practices that can be leveraged in a business setting. Narrative consulting provides a unique set of principles for externalizing the insider knowledge’s from people using the power of story. It’s a much more effective and respectful approach vs. forcing organizations to fit their process to an external plug and play offering.
 
 
Health E-Insights: What things do you do outside of work to help you be better at your job?
 
Ms. Holocher: To keep balanced and clear minded, I get outdoors as much as possible. I love being in the garden, riding my Trek road bike, and in winter, hitting the cross country ski trails near my home in Northfield, MN.
 
 
Sheldon Baker is well known for creating nutraceutical brand marketing and public relations campaigns. For Health E-Insights interview consideration, contact him at [email protected]. And follow him on Twitter @NutraInk.