Innovation is the fuel to a company’s competitiveness. Today, companies need to move faster than ever before as startups across the world develop technologies that can disrupt entire industries. Consequently, they need more fuel than ever before and must pursue innovations continuously — especially innovations occurring outside. This is because the millions of startups globally are a major source of innovation as compared to large companies. However, even with the deepest pockets, it isn’t possible to pursue all promising innovations. This is where an innovation intelligence platform comes in, enabling you to focus your resources to pursue and integrate the innovations that best align with your innovation goals.
Innovation Intelligence: Mapping Data on Emerging Startups, Technologies & Trends
Data-driven innovation intelligence entails collecting, enriching, and analyzing largely publically available data on innovations worldwide. It provides you with a decision support system to execute your external innovation strategy effectively. The quality of translating data into intelligence depends on how exhaustive and precise the data is. Most innovation intelligence tools struggle to be both exhaustive and precise since it is incredibly difficult to map the entirety of the world’s innovation in a manageable format.
The StartUs Insights Discovery Platform fills this gap. The AI-powered innovation intelligence platform features exhaustive data on over 3 million startups and scaleups globally. It combines unique data covering over 1,8 billion innovation data points, proprietary semantic search technology, and a knowledge graph. With this combination, the Discovery Platform brings the world’s information on startups, technologies, and innovations to you in just a few clicks.
Precise and Exhaustive Startup Scouting
Companies now face a hypercompetitive environment, largely in part to the bountiful startup activity around the world. However, these startups also present an opportunity to revitalize your innovation pipeline. Partnering with high-potential emerging companies brings agility to your innovation pipelines as well as provides you access to new solutions that solve your business challenges. This way, startup scouting helps you identify new areas for growth and more business opportunities.
Some features that make the Discovery Platform the best tool for your startup scouting goals:
- Greatest recall. The Discovery Platform covers more than 3 million startups and scaleups globally. When you search for startups on the AI-powered Discovery Platform, you receive more relevant results compared to any other tool. This allows you to identify all highly relevant startups from around the world, regardless of how specific or niche your query is.
- High precision. With its proprietary knowledge graph, searches on the Discovery Platform return exactly the kind of solutions you’re looking for. This prevents you from wasting time sifting through irrelevant solutions.
- Highly performant search. Want to search for startups with dozens of keywords? Not a problem. Looking to run multiple searches at the same time? The Discovery Platform’s highly performant search supports that. You can even export search results to further analyze them on your systems.
Benefits of Data-driven Startup Scouting
1. Identify Startups Faster
Traditional channels to scout startups rely on professional networks or industry events. This manual search is time-consuming and expensive. Data-driven SaaS-based startup scouting brings the time to scout startups down from weeks or months to just a few minutes. It also allows you to identify far more startups than you could otherwise.
2. Eliminate Irrelevant Startups
While scouting startups, you may run into a lot of false positives. Evaluating these startups is a waste of your time and resources. Data-driven startup scouting combines rule-based selection and filters to easily eliminate irrelevant startups. This ensures that your database of prospective solutions features only startups that are actually of interest to you. This leaves you more time to judge the merits of promising startups and make better decisions.
3. Identify New Growth Areas
Data-driven startup scouting exposes to you a wealth of insights into startup activity in your industry. Many of these startups work on new technologies or business models that are above and beyond your original query. Moreover, some of these could be your new customers or provide you access to a new customer demographic. If you keep your eyes open as an innovation manager, all of this allows you to identify new areas to grow your business.
Read this report: Find 10X Business Opportunities with Data-Driven Startup Scouting
Identify Emerging Trends Early
Just like for startup scouting, identifying high-potential technology trends before your competitors is key to long-term success. This is why trend intelligence is a great asset for your innovation journey. Trend intelligence generally involves trend landscaping and forecasting. As the names suggest, the former identifies emerging technologies in your industry whereas the latter predicts the growth of nascent and latent technologies. Both, however, increase your long-term competitiveness.
The following features make the Discovery Platform the industry-leading platform for trend intelligence:
- Covers 23 500 technology trends. It is easy to identify macro trends in any industry. What the Discovery Platform excels at is identifying latent and niche technology trends that provide you with a competitive advantage.
- Real-time trend monitoring. Our Discovery Platform continuously tracks existing and emerging technology trends and their growing (or fading) status in your industry. This ensures that you receive the most up-to-date information every time you explore trends.
- Identifies related trends. Technology trends don’t develop in isolation. For any new technology, there are alternatives as well as complementary technologies. Whenever you search for a technology trend on the Discovery Platform, it suggests a range of similar technologies to provide you with a greater diversity of potential solutions.
Benefits of Data-driven Trend Intelligence
1. Proactive Market Analysis
Data-driven trend intelligence identifies emerging technologies that have the potential to impact your industry. Some of these technologies will disrupt the markets you operate in or create new markets altogether. By monitoring technology trends at all levels, trend intelligence provides you with a bird’s eye view of where the market is headed. This gives you a leg up on your competitors.
2. Identify Threats & Opportunities
New technologies often disrupt industries. If you are too late to adopt these technologies, you risk getting behind your competitors. On the contrary, early adoption of breakthrough technologies allows you to build or maintain a competitive advantage. Data-driven trend intelligence ensures this by identifying emerging threats and opportunities in your industry’s technology landscape.
3. Future-Proof Your Business
Today, the pace of innovation activity is unprecedented, driven largely by startups around the world. This is why we at StartUs Insights recommend that you monitor technology trends in your industry regularly to stay up to date. This strategy gives you actionable insights into how different technologies in your industry are evolving over time. In turn, you make better bets on breakthrough technologies and future-proof your business.
More Innovation Insights from the Discovery Platform
While startup scouting and trend intelligence are the most popular choices among innovation intelligence services, there are others that work well for more specific purposes. The Discovery Platform supports your innovation agenda with deep data into the world’s innovation ecosystem. More innovation intelligence functions of our platform include:
Technology Scouting
The rapid pace of technology development puts even large companies at risk of being left behind. This is because startups are often faster and leaner, allowing them to react faster to emerging technology trends. Therefore, acquiring or partnering with innovative startups and scaleups is a viable and often faster alternative to internal innovation when it comes to incorporating new technologies. However, identifying emerging technologies as well as startups that develop them can be challenging.
Data-driven, SaaS-based technology scouting simplifies the process and makes it more efficient. The Discovery Platform identifies emerging technologies that are relevant to your innovation goals, enabling you to incorporate them through acquisitions or partnerships. It allows you to rapidly integrate new technologies into your innovation pipeline and leverage new business opportunities arising from the development of new technologies.
Read this report: Data-Driven Technology Scouting Speeds Up Corporate Innovation
Competitor Intelligence
The market today is far more competitive than it ever was with startup ecosystems around the world advancing new technologies by the day. Consequently, competitor intelligence is an increasingly important aspect of any company’s innovation strategy. Continuously monitoring what your competition is doing ensures that you stay on top.
The AI-powered Discovery Platform contains detailed data on every company in its database of over 3 million companies. On average, it features firmographic data from 53+ sources for each company, giving you insights into the founding year, employee number, technology readiness, and more. Moreover, we continuously update this information so you can monitor the growth of companies and startups of interest to you.
Read this report: Stay Ahead with Data-Driven Competitor Intelligence
B2B Customer Intelligence
Beyond competitors, monitoring your customers also opens up opportunities for innovation. B2C companies have long understood this and have incorporated customer feedback or co-creation as part of their product innovation. With the increasing adoption of open innovation, B2B companies also see the value in customer intelligence. It allows you to better segment your customers and maps the customer journey. This, in turn, allows you to take steps to elevate customer experience and increase retention.
The Discovery Platform’s rich firmographic data on emerging companies globally provides you with details insights into your potential customers. When you search for startups of interest on the platform, you receive information on their growth stage, core technologies, and contact information, among others. This makes the Discovery Platform a great tool for lead generation and partner sourcing.
Read this report: How Customer Intelligence drives Innovation
Product Intelligence
Today, companies cannot afford to innovate in isolation. Consequently, a major aspect of product intelligence now involves monitoring product innovations happening in your industry. Startups across the world are developing new technologies with the potential to impact your key product metrics. Further, you need to compare your product development to the latest in your industry to ensure that your products aren’t outdated.
The Discovery Platform allows you to leverage open innovation for product intelligence. You can scout startups that are developing technologies of interest for your product portfolio. Alternatively, you can scan technologies to compare them with your in-house systems or to identify areas of improvement.
Read this report: How does Data-driven Product Intelligence support Innovation?
Leverage the Power of Data-driven Innovation Intelligence
Data-driven innovation intelligence translates the wealth of disparate innovation data into actionable insights that inform your innovation initiatives. This ensures that your company continuously creates great products or services and is resilient to industry disruptions. It forms all aspects of your company from business development and strategic development to new product development. Increasingly, companies are also leveraging innovation intelligence to better engage their employees or make their processes more sustainable.
Regardless of what your innovation goals are, the Discovery Platform is a great tool to have in your toolbox. The data-driven innovation intelligence platform makes the world’s information on startups, technologies, and innovations accessible to you instantly. Here is a short list of the data it tracks:
- Firmographic data on over 3 million startups and scaleups globally
- 23 500+ technology trends
- More than 12 million news items
- 1 500+ industry databases and company aggregators
To sum up, innovation intelligence significantly improves your strategic decision-making, monitors competition, and speeds up new product development. The Discovery Platform powers your innovation intelligence by providing actionable insights with its industry-leading data and proprietary technology.
