The context

Coloplast is a global Danish medical device company developing products for people living with a stoma - a surgical procedure that reroutes the intestinal outlet through the abdominal wall, typically following bowel cancer, Crohn's disease, or ulcerative colitis. Around a million people in the UK live with a stoma. Globally the number is estimated at several million.

Life with a stoma is one of the most significant and least spoken-about chronic condition experiences. It reshapes the body permanently. It changes how people dress, travel, eat, work, sleep, and navigate every social situation involving a bathroom. The adjustments are constant, largely invisible, and entirely absent from the clinical frameworks through which most ostomy care is delivered.

Coloplast understood that the gap between what its products offered and what its customers actually needed was larger than conventional research could reveal. It wanted to be first to market with devices and services that helped people live as normal a life as possible - and it needed a different kind of insight to get there.

How it began

The Coloplast engagement began with a conversation at the Front End of Innovation Europe conference in Munich in January 2007. Peter, a product director at Coloplast, stopped at the Umio booth. As we spoke about capturing customer needs, it became increasingly difficult to maintain the pretence of pure objectivity. Chris had undergone a stoma operation months earlier. He came clean - and his first client was secured on the spot.

That personal dimension shaped everything that followed. The research was conducted by someone who had navigated the same daily realities as the patients being studied - who knew from the inside what the questions should be, which aspects of life the standard frameworks missed, and which moments of friction mattered most. This was not empathy from the outside. It was lived knowledge.

What we did

Over four years, Umio mentored Coloplast's R&D and marketing teams and completed several programmes of deep customer research across the company's stoma, wound care, and continence divisions.

The work began by mapping the actual daily life of stoma patients - not their clinical pathway but the full texture of how life with a stoma unfolds across routines, relationships, environments, and circumstances. We used immersive research techniques - observation, in-depth interviewing, and contextual enquiry - to surface the specific problems, adaptations, and desires that patients themselves could rarely articulate in conventional research settings but that shaped their experience of every product interaction.

From that foundation we identified priority opportunity spaces - the unmet needs most consequential to how people lived, most underserved by existing products, and most commercially significant for Coloplast to address. We then worked with cross-functional R&D and marketing teams to translate those insights into target concepts and innovation priorities, facilitating the internal alignment and senior buy-in that allowed the insights to move through the organisation rather than stalling at the research stage.

What we found

The research consistently revealed dimensions of stoma experience that conventional product development had not reached - and that were only accessible because the research went to where life was actually lived rather than where it was clinically classified.

The social and spatial dimensions of stoma management were among the most significant. How people navigated public spaces, travel, intimacy, and workplace situations with a stoma was shaping their relationship to every product they used - but those dimensions were invisible to a product development process focused on clinical performance metrics. Products that performed well clinically were failing experientially, and that failure was invisible until the research made it visible.

The aspiration to live as normally as possible - to have the stoma recede from the centre of attention and allow life to continue - was the most consistent and most underserved outcome across the entire patient population. This is what livability means in practice for ostomy patients. It became the organising principle for the innovation strategy.

The outcome

Following the inception of the approach Umio helped establish, Coloplast achieved 7% annual organic revenue growth - a commercial performance that reflects the depth and durability of a product pipeline grounded in genuine customer insight.

The work produced a host of innovations in stoma pouches, adhesives, and accessories, as well as new patient engagement platforms. It also produced something less tangible but equally valuable - a fundamental shift in how Coloplast's R&D and marketing teams understood their customers and worked together around that understanding.

The Coloplast relationship was the first and longest of Umio's deep enterprise partnerships. It established the approach - begin from lived experience, not from clinical classification - that has informed every project since.