Empowering key competencies to support a specific innovation strategy becomes a critical issue to the long term survival of many today's firms. This imperative reflects a challenge for design and innovation education, in properly preparing students. In this article, we present a competency framework to guide the implementation of a competency-based learning of design and innovation. In particular, we focus on skills required to implement an innovation strategy derived by a 'superior end-user understanding' to get first to market, namely the Need-Seeker Strategy. Our methodology combines an extensive literature review, an empirical study on project-based learning and expert interviews to result in an original competency framework supporting the need-seeker strategy. We believe that this is the first competency framework specifying conjointly individual and collective competencies as well as leadership competencies supporting a need-seeker innovation process.