Trend & technology scouting

As a result, markets can change, disappear completely or emerge from scratch. Disruptive technologies in particular, in combination with trends, enable completely new products and business models and can create entirely new global and regional markets. Among other things, this leads to ever faster change, which makes it particularly challenging for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to assert themselves on the market or establish themselves in new markets.

The scouting method can help to identify trends and technologies at an early stage, place their significance in the context of your own products and technologies used and exploit them for your own benefit. In addition to the classic sources - trade fairs, trade journals, discussions - the Internet in particular provides vast amounts of freely accessible knowledge that can be called up at any time.

The only questions are:

How can I harness this knowledge for my individual needs?
How can I incorporate this knowledge into my scouting?
To what extent can I use software tools and artificial intelligence here?
What exactly do I need and want for my company?
How do I anchor scouting in my company?
How do I structure and communicate the findings?

One of our tasks is to find, develop and implement solutions in this area. To this end, we develop consulting services for technology and knowledge transfer and also deal with cutting-edge technologies such as semantic data analysis. One example of the latter is the BMBF-funded project "RADAR - data-driven environment scanning for the decisions of tomorrow". Together with the project partners, Bayern Innovativ is investigating the question: How does a company use scouting to recognize its future?

How does a company recognize its future with scouting?

Finding solutions here is one of the aims of the "RADAR" research project. As a mega-trend of our time, digitalization represents both a driver and a barrier in the context of technology and trend scouting - especially for SMEs. Companies are faced with the challenge of filtering the information relevant to them from the masses of data and using this information in a targeted manner, for example to make qualified statements for their orientation based on emerging trends and new technological developments and thus translate them into concrete competitive advantages.

In the RADAR project, the project partners Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), TU Braunschweig, Leoni Kabel GmbH, Itonics GmbH and Bayern Innovativ GmbH, with the support of the Karlsruhe Project Management Agency at KIT, addressed the question of how software can support such data-driven scouting and what challenges need to be overcome. The main focus of Bayern Innovativ is to understand the challenges and needs, especially of SMEs, in trend and technology scouting and to disseminate the results.

Scouting: Challenges in the corporate environment

In the RADAR project, a software solution is being developed to recognize so-called weak signals, i.e. the first signs of new developments, and to be able to carry out targeted software-supported scouting with low resource expenditure. It turned out that the development of the software solution also involves challenges in software-specific aspects such as algorithms, sources to be connected, ontology structure and usability.
In addition, there is a wealth of individual questions from the company's perspective on the topic of scouting, which have both a direct and indirect influence on the software solution to be developed.

For example, the software must take into account that there is a very wide range of topics (trends, technologies, etc.). It also turned out that there is also a very different understanding of scouting and the associated procedure. This must be seen more as an indirect factor. The issues and needs that concern companies, especially SMEs, were developed together with companies in workshops during the course of the project.

On the technical side, solutions that are scalable are desirable. This means that it is possible to start with a small pilot group in the company and then expand to include more and more employees. This is because companies see real added value in cross-company knowledge and collaboration in interdisciplinary teams. A solution is therefore needed that enables such collaboration. The topic is usually triggered and coordinated by one department, but the majority opinion of the companies surveyed is that a major impact for the company as a whole can only be achieved through cross-company work.

In the workshops with the companies, it also became clear that it is not just about such more technical aspects, but that the corporate and innovation culture must also be considered. Only if there is a good culture of innovation in the company and awareness that scouting is an important component of innovation can it be successfully established and used.

It was also found that there are very different understandings and definitions of the term "scouting" and that very few companies have a conceptual process in place. From this, it can be deduced that aspects such as support in the scouting set-up, the transfer of theoretical and practical knowledge on scouting in the innovation management context and knowledge in the context of corporate and innovation culture are important for the successful establishment of scouting, especially for SMEs.

Bayern Innovativ develops workshops and offers to take this into account.

Click here for the event overview.

A closer look at the technical challenges shows that companies currently spend a lot of time and money on monitoring their environment. Small and medium-sized companies in particular find it much more difficult than large corporations to implement environment scanning, i.e. the monitoring of the corporate environment, in a professionalized manner due to their scarcity of resources. Here, the use of software is seen as extremely promising for minimizing costs, especially if it has a certain level of intelligence.

Companies have various requirements for the software. These include

• simple handling or intuitive understanding of the software solution ("usability")
• Easy access with good availability
• Cost-effective solution - also for pilot projects
• scalability (start with a small group and then gradually expand)
• Can be combined with existing IT solutions
• Automation (use of "AI")

Companies consider the use of software in scouting to be sensible and expedient. The aspects mentioned above are almost more important than a large selection of digitally integrated data sources. It is important that "standard" data sources, such as patents, scientific articles or news, are connected. In addition, it should be possible to use your own search strategy or specify your own search field, as companies have very different search fields and search strategies. On the one hand, this means that there is a wide range overall and, on the other hand, also within the company.

Software prototype for data-driven scouting

These results, findings and challenges were incorporated into the development of a software prototype for data-driven scouting by project partner Itonics GmbH. The resulting prototype is being tested in workshops with a method from the field of UUX for user-friendliness and usability of the results with interested companies and thus potential users in order to drive forward further development in the sense of an iterative approach.

At the same time, Bayern Innovativ is also developing concepts and offers that are dedicated to the more "soft skill"-based or theoretical requirements.

In conclusion, it can be said that the RADAR project hits the nerve of today's world and the challenges facing companies, especially SMEs. Through the cooperation of the project consortium, a needs-oriented and usable scouting software can be provided for both SMEs and larger companies, and the other identified needs can also be included and addressed with solutions.

About the project:

Based on the mega-trend of digitalization, the aim of the BMBF-funded research project RADAR is to develop an environment scanning system that can be used to analyze large amounts of data in order to identify relevant signals, trends and technologies as well as disruptive changes and new contexts in the corporate environment in real time. To achieve this, existing techniques from the fields of machine learning, applied statistics and semantic analysis of large amounts of data will be combined to develop a software solution.

By involving partners from the field and interested external companies, the developed solution will be extensively tested and the knowledge gained will be fed back into software development as part of an iterative process. The end result should be a cloud-based environment scanning system that companies of all sizes and from all industries can use with minimal resources to monitor their environment in a targeted manner. This should enable them to make their processes more efficient, react to changes at an early stage and develop future-oriented strategies.

You can find out more about technology and innovation management here!