Digital transformation has accelerated, as has everything else on the digital landscape. Being a first mover in whatever space your company inhabits isn’t necessary, but it would be nice. And it could give an edge that any company could use these days. Our latest report – the Modern Analyst’s Guide to Tech Scouting & Innovation Mapping will get you there.
In it, we cover these three key elements for tech scouting:
- How market intelligence reveals tech conversations and how they interconnect
- How to spot companies making moves in the tech world
- Ways to map success by understanding company and patent datasets
And these statistics around the growth of tech, emerging trends and where the market is headed help communicate how essential all of this is:
- In 2021, the tech sector is expecting 14% earnings per share (EPS) growth rate
- The global blockchain technology market is estimated to reach USD 57,641.3 million, by the end of 2025.
Taking Tech Scouting Seriously
It’s important to move with the trends if you hope to be successful in today’s fast paced world of technology. And as better tech emerges, folding it into your product development could be critical. Tech scouting reveals many facets of technology – from key patents, competitors’ activity in the domain to the overall conversation circling around it.
Using competitive intelligence to explore tech-talk, our clusters below are organized into easily digestible segments. Each one reveals key intel that can help a company determine areas of interest or ideas that are worth being pursued. For example, our largest three clusters are Digital Transformation, Economic Innovations, and Healthcare Innovations. They take up 30% of this cluster and you can see how they interact with one another. In fact, Digital Transformation is central to this conversation:
Each cluster and node are clickable to explore, revealing blogs, articles, and news all dedicated to technology and its many branches. Taken as a whole, it could be overwhelming if it wasn’t for the ability to use market intelligence to break down information in many different ways.
One way is to locate areas of interest and organize them by tags. For example, by creating a Blockchain Tech tag, articles like these below appear for us to explore. And we can see clickable keywords that help one discover other related publications:
With the technology market expected to have a 14% EPS growth rate in 2021, that’s something any organization would want to be a part of. And market research can aid you in this by helping:
- Identify the innovators and companies in a segment
- Pinpoint technology trends
- Discover white spaces
- Locate patents
- Identify technology movements by geographic location
We have many ways to track this intel, detailed in our report. In it, we share a high-level overview of the insight offered from these two datasets – company and patents.
Company Intel for Tech Scouting
Once you understand the conversation, you can begin to pull back the layers of intel. Understanding who is investing where and in what can be crucial information if you’re seeking to keep tabs on the competition, or just seeing where you can fit in.
Our bar chart makes short work of locating investing companies, as well as tracking what tech each is invested in.
It shows investment amounts on the left and investors listed at the bottom. Each color represents a different segment, and the companies invested are highlighted. For example, Greylock Partners invested heavily in two companies –Aurora Innovation of the automotive segment and Acta Technology, Inc which is involved in web design.
- Acta Tech, an IT Company received 87M from Greylock Partners. And we can see it was acquired in 2002 by Business Objects SA.
- Aurora, in the software industry, received 162M, with more details available around where these businesses are located, their yearly revenue and founding year.
From this search, we can locate emerging investment trends and view them in a timeline to track their staying power over time – and much more.
And once you decide where to invest, next you must sort through what to invest in, specifically. As the choices there are equally varied. And this brings us to patents.
Patents for Innovation Mapping
Innovation mapping is your microscope to invention. You can view products launched in the last X amount of years by looking at them through a patent’s lens. You can observe failure/success of a patent, what type of innovation it is, and create a comparison to your competitors’ efforts. It’s a critical piece of intel that every good competitive intelligence plan incorporates.
For example, let’s say company X decided to invest in Blockchain Technology which is estimated to reach USD 57,641.3 million, by the end of 2025. Our patent timeline using market research is filtered to show blockchain tech only. Overall patents involving this technology spike in 2019, and every segment seems to be represented, which speaks to the rising popularity and versatility of it.
Zeroing in on one segment specifically, Enterprise was barely a blip in 2016. As it hits 2018, we see a considerable increase. And in Q2 of 2020 it more than doubles its size. And clicking to explore Enterprise patents gives us filing dates, details on what the patent is for and other vital information. Here is an example of one that was filed in January of 2020:
Or we can explore this segment in other ways to see how it intermingles with other categories.
Viewing Enterprise in our cluster view, our example patent from above has reach far outside of its category, indicating broader applications within the market and potentially revealing a larger trend:
It demonstrates why exploring all facets of your mapping is critical. With such a vast landscape to cover, recognizing a small, but growing trend hidden within the data could prove challenging, if not something one would miss all together.
Be sure to download the Modern Analyst’s Guide to Tech Scouting & Innovation Mapping for more insight around these two game changing capabilities and reach out for a demo detailing your industry and discover opportunities ahead of the competition.
