How Data-Driven Trend Intelligence Future-Proofs Your Business

At any given time, dozens of new technology trends are emerging. Predicting which ones of these will disrupt your industry and which ones will fizzle out is challenging, however. Still, in today’s fast-paced world, no company can afford to ignore emerging trends. If they invest too much in a dying trend, it incurs substantial losses. But if they don’t invest in a trend that transforms their industry, they risk being left behind. How can you spot emerging trends early on? Data-driven Trend Intelligence is the answer. Let’s explore why!

What is Data-Driven Trend Intelligence?

Innovation happens faster now than ever before. Consequently, the kind of shifts in the industry that used to take decades now occur every few years. As the space of technology development is accelerating, new breakthroughs continue to happen much more frequently. This makes staying up-to-date with the latest trends a massive challenge for companies.

Companies need solutions that analyze publicly available innovation data to discover emerging trends and the industries they impact early on. Data-Driven Trend Intelligence meets this need. But what exactly is it?

Trend Intelligence is the process of identifying emerging and latent trends and developments that will impact an organization’s competitiveness in the long term. As such, Trend Intelligence is part of Innovation Intelligence — a broader process of aggregating, enriching, and validating publicly available data to orient and support decision-making for the innovation process. This data includes but is not limited to emerging technologies, trends, and their drivers in the marketplace, such as startups, scaleups, and technology companies, as well as government data such as patents.

The Trend Analysis Map is an example of a Data-Driven Technology Scouting Deliverable. It gives you an overview of emerging technology trends and their applications, accessible at one glance.

How Trend Intelligence Future-Proofs Your Company

While predicting the future is (still) impossible, the next best thing is to sample as many future possibilities as you can. Fortunately, this is exactly what trend intelligence – or Trend Landscaping – accomplishes.

The current challenge is that technological and business trends evolve at different rates, sometimes even in divergent ways across different global hubs. Regardless of the industry, trend intelligence allows companies to better understand the dynamics of each trend to understand how it evolves. Trend intelligence lets companies navigate thousands of emerging innovations to get an accurate overview of high-level technological trends with the potential to impact their industry. Further, visualizing the growth and decline of technology trends gives insights into which technological trends will impact a company’s operations in the future. This way, like technology scouting and startup scouting, trend scouting prevents companies from going obsolete in the face of growing competition from other companies and, perhaps more importantly, young startups.

To sum up, some of the questions that trend intelligence answers include: Which additional products can increase your market share? Are you spending money in a particular area when your competitors are investing in other areas? What technological innovations will allow you to create value for your customers in the long term and capture a greater market share?

How Big Data & AI Make Trend Intelligence More Efficient

Traditionally, the trend intelligence process required business analysts to track technology and business news for years on end. In the process, they’d spend weeks, if not months, investigating trends that ultimately turn out to be dead-ends. This led to increased costs paired with slow decision-making processes. Moreover, thanks to the exponential pace of innovation these days, new trends appear (and sometimes disappear) at time scales that are impossible for analysts to keep up with.

A data-driven trend intelligence process utilizes Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI), in conjunction with human analysts, to analyze emerging industry trends more effectively. First, rule-based methods are used to eliminate irrelevant trends. Next, Big Data & AI in combination with human expertise match trends to your requirements. Lastly, by including other data sources such as news or social media, the data is contextualized to give you actionable insights.

Reap the Benefits of Data-Driven Trend Intelligence

Following this data-driven trend intelligence approach has several advantages:

• Spot & understand market trends as they emerge: By spotting and understanding market trends as they emerge, trend intelligence gives your innovation strategy an edge over the competition.
• Stay in line with up-and-coming technologies: Trend Intelligence allows you to plan your R&D and product development strategy in line with up-and-coming technological trends that will impact your industry in the near future.
• Anticipate business opportunities and threats: Moreover, it enables you to better understand, anticipate, and react to opportunities and threats in new and adjacent spaces that your internal teams may be unaware of.
• Future-proof your product and services: It is often said that hindsight is always 20/20. Trend intelligence ensures that your foresight is good enough to future-proof your product and services to quickly meet changing customer demand.

What You Get from Trend Intelligence

Because there are so many, it is challenging to identify trends that best align with your innovation ambitions without a systemic, data-driven approach to navigate the trend landscape. On the contrary, a systemic data-driven approach identifies the trends that are most relevant to your needs. This way, you can be sure to spot emerging trends as they appear.

Depending on your innovation goals and requirements, companies specialized in data-driven Trend Intelligence like us offer a range of deliverables that meet your needs. Some of these include:

• Trend Map: Based on data-driven research, we classify emerging trends and group them into categories so you can see all of them at one glance.
• Trend Report: The Trend Report provides you with quantitative insights into the most impactful trends. Additionally, it presents exemplary startups advancing each trend.
• Startup Database: The Startup Database lets you discover a high number of innovative startups that are advancing the emerging technologies trends in your industry.

To discover how we at StartUs Insights empower you to identify the most relevant trends impacting your industry and stay competitive in a dynamic market, we offer a free consultation. If you want to quickly find and track technology trends that will shape your industry, get in touch today to identify what’s next!