Independent field evidence for the decision to enter a new market, launch a new product line, or extend a working model into a new geography. The cost of being wrong is a scaling budget; the cost of being right is a scoping conversation.
A product that works in one market can land differently in another. A promising segment can be a mirage of survivorship bias. A local partner can look aligned in a deck and misaligned in a working week. Market & expansion research reaches the people whose behaviour will decide the outcome and reports what they actually do, want, and can afford.
The Lab runs this work through the same field method we use for impact studies, but pointed at a different decision. Not "did the intervention change lives?" but "will this expansion hold when the subsidy ends, when the influencer network runs out, and when the founder is not in the room?"
Four questions recur.
Who says they want it, who has tried to pay for it, and what the walk-away price actually is. Observed behaviour, not stated preference.
The home-market segmentation usually breaks. New segments emerge along axes your personas can't see (income timing, informal-sector membership, mobile-money reach). We build them from the interviews.
Payment, distribution, after-sales, regulation, informal alternatives, trust intermediaries. Any one missing stalls the launch. We map the stack from the user's side before capital is committed.
The ways this expansion is most likely to fail, ranked. A pre-mortem grounded in field evidence beats discovering failure modes in production.
The same five-stage method as every Lab engagement, compressed to a decision timeline:
Turnaround is measured in weeks. Where the answer is "not yet, and here's why," we say so; that is the value of asking an independent research team.
The best-documented public example is the mobility case study in Nairobi, where the question was exactly this shape: will the daily economics of an electric two-wheeler hold once the subsidy ends, and for which rider segments? The Before the Capital reading generalises the pattern across sectors where a European venture is weighing a new-market commitment.
For the wider frame, see the Four Ways a Transition Lands matrix on why market entry into a low-state-capacity context succeeds or plateaus, and the BReW framework for reading which incumbent barriers your entry actually engages.
See Who We Serve for how the fit works.
If this reads close to a decision you are weighing, we would like to hear about it. A short note is enough to start.
The Lab is an independent research team, not an advocacy organisation. We do not campaign, endorse products, or accept commissions where a finding is expected in advance. Where a partner's own theory of change is what needs testing, that is a legitimate engagement, and the Lab tests it honestly.