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RLX Innovation Process
A more predictable, more resonant, and more defensible approach to health and care innovation - grounded in how life is actually lived.
The problem with conventional health innovation
Most health and care innovation fails not because the design is wrong or the execution is poor. It fails because it starts from the wrong picture of reality.
Conventional innovation frameworks - persona-based design, outcomes-driven research, market segmentation, clinical pathway analysis - all begin from what systems can observe and classify. They capture what people report, what they score, what they do in controlled conditions. What they cannot reach is the texture of daily life: the relational dynamics, affective forces, spatial constraints, bodily rhythms, and institutional pressures that determine whether an innovation fits the way life is actually lived - or misses it entirely.
The result is predictable. Solutions that test well in research and underperform in the market. Products that are clinically sound and experientially alienating. Innovations that improve one dimension of a condition while leaving the dimensions that matter most untouched.
This is not a research problem. It is a perception problem.
What the RLX Innovation Process does differently
For nearly twenty years Umio has delivered outcome-driven innovation to leading consumer health, medtech, and pharma companies. That methodology - rigorous, structured, and proven - remains at the heart of what we do.
What has changed is the perceptual foundation beneath it.
The RLX Innovation Process integrates our outcome-driven methodology with Real Lived Experience - the framework we have developed over ten years to perceive the hidden dynamics of life with a condition. Together they produce something no conventional innovation process can replicate: a rigorous, structured path from the real texture of lived experience to prioritised innovation opportunities, grounded evidence, and commercially defensible strategy.
The process begins not with a patient persona or a clinical pathway but with a framed RLX context - the actual relational, environmental, bodily, and social conditions in which life with a condition unfolds. Examples might include younger adults living with a stoma, ethnic minority experiences of wound care, caregiver burden in home dialysis, or veterans with chronic pain navigating employment. Within that context, Bergson generates a comprehensive set of Real Lived Outcomes - the states, capacities, and conditions people are actually trying to hold together, sustain, or prevent in daily life.
How it works in practice
Frame
We define the RLX context precisely: the population, condition, place, and relational circumstances that bound the lived experience we are exploring. This framing is more specific and more experientially grounded than a conventional research brief.
Perceive
Using Bergson and our RLX research methods, we generate a comprehensive picture of the lived experience field: the affective dynamics, relational conditions, spatial and material forces, and institutional pressures shaping daily life within the context. This includes a full set of Real Lived Outcomes — typically 90 to 110 for a single context.
Prioritise
Through direct engagement with people living the condition and structured analysis of the RLO set, we identify the highest-value innovation opportunities: where lived need is greatest, where current solutions fall furthest short, and where the potential for genuine differentiation is strongest.
Act
Prioritised RLOs guide concept development, strategy formation, and innovation execution. Interventions are designed specifically to address the targeted lived outcomes, with evidence grounding built in from the start.
The RLX Innovation Process is designed for innovation, R&D, market access, and strategy teams at medtech, pharma, and consumer health enterprises who are working on chronic conditions, long-term care, or complex patient populations - and who recognise that conventional research methods are not giving them the full picture.
It is particularly valuable when the condition is complex or poorly understood, when conventional segmentation is not revealing meaningful differences in need, when a market access or reimbursement argument needs stronger experiential grounding, or when previous innovation efforts have underperformed despite strong clinical evidence.
What it delivers
For enterprises working through the RLX Innovation Process, the consistent outcomes are:
Greater Predictability
Innovation opportunities are grounded in validated lived experience rather than assumed needs, reducing the risk of late-stage failure.
Sharper Prioritisation
Real Lived Outcomes reveal where the genuine unmet need is greatest, focusing investment where it will have the most impact.
Stronger Differentiation
Solutions grounded in lived experience resonate in ways that clinically-derived competitors cannot replicate, because they address dimensions of the condition experience that no other framework surfaces
More Compelling Evidence
The RLO set and the insight process behind it provide a new kind of evidence for reimbursement, market access, and internal investment decisions — grounded in how health is actually lived rather than how it is clinically classified.