The next decade of growth belongs to the inventors
For the past decade, growth has been the metric that defined success.
Every company chased it. Every team measured it. Every board demanded it.
But somewhere along the way, growth became a performance, a show of progress rather than progress itself. Dashboards filled up, strategies multiplied, and innovation departments bloomed. Yet the results often stayed the same. What looked like acceleration was, in truth, growth theatre, all motion, little movement.
The world doesn’t need more growth. It needs better growth.
The speed gap is widening
Consumers are evolving faster than companies. Platforms emerge and explode in the time it takes to brief a campaign. New technologies redefine categories overnight. AI collapses the distance between creativity and code, between brand and performance.
The result? Many brands are sprinting to keep up, but few are truly leading the race. And yet, every CEO and CMO is asking the same question:
“How can I grow faster than the world is changing?”
At DEPT®, that’s the question we’ve spent the past year obsessing over. We spoke with more than 50 clients, industry leaders, and partners to understand what’s next. The answer, we found, isn’t about more speed or more optimisation. It’s about invention.
From optimisation to invention
Optimisation makes you efficient, but invention makes you relevant.
You can’t A/B test your way into the future. You can’t automate your way into differentiation. To grow faster than the market, brands need to stop trying to catch up and start inventing what comes next.
That’s where Growth Invention comes in.
Growth Invention is how we help brands build the future, not just respond to it. It’s growth that’s designed, not improvised, and built at the intersection of marketing, technology, and creativity.
To make this tangible, we’ve developed the Growth Invention Framework
It is designed to help marketing leaders and executives acquire, grow, and retain their customers. By identifying where growth is blocked and where the biggest opportunities lie. By combining practical business, product, and marketing experience with technology and AI-driven insight, it operates as a continuous loop, with your customers at the centre.
This framework helps organisations answer the most critical questions:
- Where should we focus next to grow faster?
- Where are we strong, and where are we losing ground?
- Who are my next customers, and what do they care about?
- Which ideas have the best chance to drive growth?
- How fast can we test an idea and see results?
- Are we learning from our customers in the right ways?
- Which new idea will make the biggest impact at scale?
- How do we keep scaling what works?
This is how we’ll help brands move beyond the illusion of progress and toward durable, directional growth that actually changes their business trajectory.
The next 10 years start here
As we enter our second decade as a company, we’re doubling down on what DEPT® does best: pioneering new ideas, driving customer growth, and delivering faster than anyone else. This re-invention will define how we’ll create clarity, focus, and momentum across everything we do.
Learn more about the Growth Invention Framework and how to build a foundation for growth.
