Little but
Big Collective
Experienced design-thinkers
to get more out of innovation
A team of independent designers and marketing experts with a strong understanding of clients’ business reality. We help our clients transform their brands and organization through innovative solutions and create insight-led products and experiences. We bring multi-industry experience but we thrive on health, food and beverage projects, from yoghurt, confectionary to plant-based alternatives.
What We Do
Innovation strategy programs
Working with our clients to uncover growth opportunities, set a future vision for your business and teams, invent new insight-driven products or business models, customer experiences, brands and services.
Consumer insights discovery
We design inspiring qualitative research programs that uncover rich actionable insights. We translate the learning into products, innovation strategies and actions. We mix traditional ethnographic tools, market immersions and expert interviews with agile online research tools.
Food and Beverage:
People x Planet x Possibilities
Our team has worked over the years with large and medium-sized food manufacturers, supporting R& D, brand, and innovation teams.
We help our clients to identify relevant trends and future scenarios and deliver launchable product concepts and prototypes. We have supported R&D teams with their sustainability strategy, bridging the gap between high-level commitments and project roadmaps.
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Ideation sprints (Live / Online)
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Product & Service innovation pipelines
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Trends & Industry experts foresight
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Consumer co-creation
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Consumer Design research – from ethnographies to consumer online communities
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Market immersion
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Food Concept and prototype development
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Start-up inspiration and collaboration models
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Sustainability: from trends, consumers evaluation to roadmaps
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Green Packaging guidelines
People
Because the success of a project is driven by skills and people, our projects are led by tailor-made teams of agile, independent consultants across the world for any strategy, innovation and insights challenge.
Vanessa Mayneris Founder
Vanessa founded The Little Big Collective after leading the Food and beverage team at Plan. She is a product and innovation management expert with consulting and client-side experience spanning the food, pharma and cosmetics sectors for over 20 years. Her talents lie in inspiring and leading teams and putting consumer needs at the heart of innovation. She led an European team of innovation managers at Abbvie Pharmaceuticals, helping brand teams to co-create with patients innovative solutions beyond the pill. Previously she held progressive innovation and product development roles within Danone Dairy and L’Oréal in London, Paris and Kuala Lumpur. Vanessa helped companies in the creation of new ideas through strategic and creative thinking in French, English and Italian.
An enthusiast food innovation blogger, Vanessa is a regular event speaker (Food Matters Live, Kellogg executives conference, Drupa, Woman in Agriculture,...), and a well being
& sleep management (through sophrology) practitioner.
Her passion for food and sustainability led her to volunteer for the Felix project, the leading food redistribution charity in London and organise webinars and workshops as founder of the HEC Green UK Alumni community in London.
Some of our trusted partners collaborating on
our projects across the UK, France, US and beyond
Ben Ackerley and Josh Allsopp
Design thinking and sustainability
Ben And Josh have worked with Vanessa over the last 3 years and recently founded.
Passionate innovation strategists, with first-class BA (Hons) in Design for Industry from Northumbria University, they have both worked in-house for Mars and varied top British design consultancies. They combine systematic problem solving with creativity, agility and flexibility to solve their clients’ wicked problems, specialising in innovation for consumer packaged goods, packaging sustainability strategy and R&D team visions.
findnorth.uk
Maha Tahiri
Nutrition and technology
An experienced R&D leader, Maha has helped us assess consumers and technology trends in food.
Based in Minneapolis, US, she supports start-ups and companies aiming at improving the global food system by leveraging science, consumer knowledge and technology to deliver innovations that will improve the health of the food supply and the environment.
nutritionsustainability.com
Severine Ballick
AgTech and start-ups
Severine is a long time Investor in Food, Agtech and Digital Health based in London.
An advisor for EIT food, she is a women entrepreneur, investor and has organised many workshops on trends, innovation, corporate venturing, investments for her corporate clients and investors. Her intimate knowledge of the global startup ecosystem was essential in some of our projects to understand industry trends and the different models used by corporates to build partnerships and invest with food entrepreneurs.
middlelandcapital.com
