What is Data-driven Innovation Intelligence?

Looking to tap into external innovation? Learn how data-driven innovation intelligence provides a decision support system for your external innovation strategy.

The scale of innovation today is unprecedented. The amount of information that innovators across industries and countries generate is mind-boggling. This is both a challenge and opportunity for companies seeking external innovation. Data-driven innovation intelligence arms companies to collect, enrich, and analyze largely publicly available data ranging from firmographic information and technology news to patent databases. This provides organizations with a decision support system or process to execute their external innovation strategy.

Innovation intelligence encompasses a range of niche services. Mainly, it serves two purposes. It allows companies to identify the most promising startups and technologies and it offers insights on how to incorporate various innovations to advance your business needs. Major innovation intelligence services include the following:

Innovation Scouting
Business Intelligence
- Market Intelligence
- Decision Support

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Startup scouting provides a peek into emerging solutions coming from startups, the major drivers of innovation.

Innovation Scouting

With unprecedented startup activity and global knowledge sharing, innovations now come up more frequently than ever before. In every industry, there are a large number of industry trends, technologies, and their drivers (startups, scale-ups, high-growth companies) with the potential to further the organization’s innovation goals.

Startup Scouting

This is the process by which organizations identify startups and scale-ups that can support their innovation goals with partnerships, acquisitions, or collaborations. Depending on their requirements, companies scout startups for a variety of reasons. Some of these include:

A common purpose of startup scouting is to generate relevant leads. For example, companies are always looking for potential customers or those who they can invite to their startup calls or other open innovation challenges. Startup scouting ensures that the leads are highly relevant to the defined objectives.
Conversely, businesses are also looking for startups they can buy from. These include customer relationship management (CRM) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions. Innovation intelligence boosts partner sourcing, thereby identifying startups that best align with a business’s processes
Though startups are a great source of innovation, their abundance also presents a challenge for companies looking to work with them. Innovation intelligence separates the wheat from the chaff and, thus, improves the return on interest for startup sourcing initiatives.

Technology Scouting

Comparable to startup scouting, the focus here is on technologies in an industry rather than the startups developing them. Data-driven technology scouting identifies emerging technologies that are relevant to an organization’s innovation goals as well as guides how to incorporate them. Among other objectives, it empowers you to do the following:

As you’d expect, the most common purpose for performing technology scouting is to source technologies. It allows innovation managers to discover and evaluate technology trends that a company should invest in to stay competitive.
Companies cannot afford to simultaneously pursue all new technologies. To minimize risk, they assess the feasibility of different technologies. It also allows them to determine the technology’s fit to existing processes as well as calculate their economic potential.
Patents and other intellectual property (IP) data provide a peek into which innovations the industry, as well as academia, is pursuing. This is why companies are incorporating IP monitoring in their innovation intelligence to identify new technologies early on.

Trend Intelligence

New technology trends come up at a remarkable pace. Though many of them are likely to fizzle out, few will disrupt your industry. Trend intelligence identifies emerging and latent technology trends and developments that will impact an organization’s competitiveness in the long term. Depending on its scope, it largely focuses on one of the following:

With trend landscaping, innovation managers get insights on emerging trends across the industry. This allows companies to stay competitive in the long term.
The goal of trend forecasting is slightly different. Often, the process predicts the future of nascent and latent technologies. This allows companies to evaluate which potentially disruptive technologies to invest more in.

Business Intelligence

Companies perform operations like consumer and competitor analyses to improve their performances. Innovation intelligence provides a wealth of data that significantly improve the odds of success of these operations. This is why innovation data for business intelligence is becoming a huge driver for innovations across industries.

Market Intelligence

Companies have long used market intelligence to evaluate their short-term and long-term options. However, the explosion in the number of startups presents new competitive threats. It has an upside as well as they provide rich data on market trends, which innovation intelligence taps to improve the quality of market intelligence. Some kinds of market intelligence include:

Firmographic data analytics provide detailed insights into the startup activity in an industry or region. In addition to improving lead generation, it improves sales intelligence and customer retention as well.
Competitor intelligence involves keeping track of the competition — both other companies and startups. This improves marketing and sales intelligence as well as provides data-backed projections for the industry.
Consumer intelligence derives actionable insights from consumer patterns. This enables companies to adapt quickly to changing consumer trends and stay competitive.
Businesses today are impacted by multiple factors in their environment, including economic, political, and legal changes. Environmental scanning allows companies to monitor these factors and analyze all of them to improve their resilience.

Decision Support

Often, a company finds technologies or models during its open innovation search that it can adapt to its processes. This offers a low-cost, low-risk way to improve profitability and competitiveness. Some of the ways innovation intelligence provides decision support include:

Benchmarking internal projects with external innovations adds value to project management as well as improves product lifecycle management.
Scanning the market provides valuable insights that aid strategic planning. For instance, it allows companies to determine what to add to their product portfolios, how to price their products, and which new verticals to add to their business.
Increasingly, companies are leveraging data-driven decision support to further sustainability management as well. This includes identifying opportunities to reduce emissions or adopt circularity.
Innovation intelligence also finds use in build-buy-partner strategies and mergers and acquisitions (M&A) decisions, improving the quality of decision-making for these major events.
Lastly, companies are using innovation data to prepare themselves for changing workplace trends and promote intrapreneurship.

Leverage Data-driven Innovation Intelligence

Innovation intelligence converts the noise of structured and unstructured innovation data into insights that make your business more competitive. To make the most of data-driven innovation intelligence, you need a solution like the Big Data and Artificial Intelligence-powered StartUs Insights Discovery Platform. Based on your innovation goals, some of the deliverables that we at StartUs Insights provide 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 technology trends in your industry.