For survival and growth in the face of increasing global competition, companies must continuously advance themselves and their product portfolio. This means that organizations that continuously innovate benefit from a sustained competitive advantage and profitability in dynamic business environments. Therefore, companies naturally seek to develop or incorporate solutions that act as a catalyst in their innovation process.
However, speeding up innovation is a challenging task because it’s a concept without fixed rules that differs according to each company’s capabilities and requirements. Moreover, managing innovation effectively is easier said than done as companies today face challenges like never before. Some of these include increased volatility of markets, rapidly changing customer needs, and rising competition due to the exponential pace of digitization and technology development.
Traditionally, companies discovered innovation at conferences, industry trade shows, as well as within their personal and professional networks. Today, as new startups and technologies are shooting up like mushrooms, tracking innovation through traditional methods has become impossible. On the contrary, data-driven innovation scouting is an efficient, cost-effective, and quick way to find the right startups and technologies that match your innovation goals.
What is an Innovation Catalyst?
In a chemical reaction, a catalyst enables it to proceed at a much faster rate as compared to not using a catalyst. More importantly, the catalyst is not consumed in the reaction and remains available for another run. In innovation, a data-driven scouting process assumes the role of a catalyst. The data-driven process leverages Big Data and Artificial Intelligence to scan through millions of startups and scaleups globally within a few seconds. This means that through data-driven innovation scouting, you get to identify industry trends, emerging technologies, as well as relevant startups, scaleups, and high-growth companies with the potential to further your innovation goals.
However, the data alone is not the catalyst for innovation. The catalytic effect comes with the ability to quickly and exhaustively search through millions of data points about innovation and gather valuable insights from them. A data-driven process allows companies to scout innovations much faster as compared to traditional desk research.
Speed Up Your Progress with Innovation Scouting
By analyzing billions of data points from millions of innovation sources (startup website, news outlets, patent databases, social media, etc.), the innovation scouting process lets you quickly identify technology trends that best align with your innovation ambitions. Often called Innovation Discovery or Innovation Exploration, Innovation Scouting is the process of leveraging innovation intelligence to identify industry trends, technologies, and their drivers with the potential to further an organization’s innovation goals. The main benefits of data-driven innovation scouting include:
- Identify new technological trends that improve your company’s processes
- Discover innovative startups and scaleups that are not yet on your radar
- Gain a competitive advantage to stay ahead of the technology curve
- Save time and resources that otherwise would have been spent on weeks of desk research
If leveraged efficiently, data acts as a catalyst for your innovation process. It provides actionable innovation intelligence on startups, emerging technologies, and trends that will impact your business. The slides shown above are example deliverables by StartUs Insights.
How Can You Catalyze Your Innovation Process?
Our Big Data and AI-powered StartUs Insights Discovery Platform, covering over 2,5 M startups and scaleups globally, is a good example of an innovation catalyst. By using the Discovery Platform you implement a systemic data-driven approach to analyze granular data on startups and scaleups that are advancing emerging technology trends. Depending on your innovation goals and requirements, the platform offers a range of deliverables for your technology scouting process. Some of these include:
- Innovation Scouting: Exhaustively identify industry trends, technologies, and their drivers
- Startup Scouting: Identify startups and scaleups that can support your innovation goals through partnerships, acquisitions, or as vendors
- Technology Scouting: Discover emerging technologies that are relevant to your innovation goals and incorporate them through acquisitions or partnerships
- Trend Landscaping: Get comprehensive information on emerging and latent trends and developments that will impact your competitiveness in the long term
To discover how we at StartUs Insights identify the emerging technologies that match your innovation goals and the startups advancing them, we offer a free consultation. If you want to speed up your innovation process, get in touch!
