How do you keep yourself and your business up to date? Where do you get trend knowledge about your industry? Are you specifically looking for innovations and new technologies, start-ups or research results that could influence your company? And are you already using artificial intelligence for this?
Then you may have heard of trend and innovation scouting. This involves researching and observing the latest innovations, trends and industry developments. In this blog post we will show you why innovation scouting is important and what challenges you may face. We will also tell you which tools are best for searching for trends and innovations.
Modern scouting tools such as the Innovation Compass keep you constantly up to date and enable you to conduct in-depth research on specific trends or industries. This way you can quickly and easily find relevant technologies, products, startups or other innovations!
3 reasons why you can't avoid trend and innovation scouting
A variety of options for optimizing and expanding your offering. Targeted trend and innovation scouting opens up a variety of opportunities for your company to optimize and expand your offering. The early recognition of emerging trends and their opportunities and risks enables you to strengthen the competitiveness of your company. This allows you to continually adapt and improve your product or services to meet the needs of your customers.
Position yourself as a pioneer Companies that recognize trends and innovations early can also position themselves as pioneers and convince their customers with innovative technologies and solutions. This not only strengthens customer loyalty, but also opens up opportunities for significant competitive advantages. Customers begin to perceive the company as an innovator and pioneer. This in turn can lead to an increase in market reputation in the long term.
Provide inspiration and motivation in your company. You should know about current trends, not just for the external impact. Trend scouting will also have a positive impact within your company. This can give your workforce a boost in motivation because they have the opportunity to be inspired again and again. Employees can expand their creative horizons and regularly find out about current trends, the latest technologies and innovative solutions. This can contribute significantly to a motivated and committed workforce. This is always able to bring improved and more creative solutions to every innovation project, which ultimately strengthens the company's ability to innovate in the long term.
What challenges need to be taken into account when scouting trends and innovations?
We now know that the targeted search for trends and innovations brings many advantages for your company. However, this is not always easy or effortless to accomplish. Because where is the best place to look for innovations? Which sources are relevant for your own company?
Anyone who has ever done innovation scouting will have noticed that you have to search through an almost infinite number of sources and filter out the right information from this flood of data. The difficulty lies in identifying the sources relevant to your own company. Specialist literature, study results, online and print media must be scoured for relevant information. This costs time and resources. This is a major challenge for many companies that can quickly overwhelm them without machine support, such as artificial intelligence .
Another challenge for many companies is distributing the information to the right departments and employees after research. The creation of networked knowledge within the company can be crucial for success. It is important to ensure that the right information gets to the right departments and employees at the right time so that they can make informed decisions. In addition, continuous inspiration ensures ever better solutions in all areas and helps you not only with the big and important decisions, but also with the daily small and short-term ones. This requires a well-thought-out knowledge management strategy and the use of tools and technologies that facilitate communication and knowledge sharing.
Speaking of tools. These are very useful for data processing, but are often very complex to use. Employees must be familiar with the tools and have the skills necessary to efficiently process the data and derive useful insights from it. Training and upskilling employees in the use of these tools is therefore crucial to overcome this challenge.
Today’s solutions for your trend and innovation scouting
Digital scouting and monitoring tools can help you with trend and innovation scouting, allowing you to automate your research and implement it easily. AI-supported tools are particularly suitable for your research. Artificial intelligence can help you identify the right trends and estimate their influence.
AI systems that have access to big data can understand relationships between trends, identify emerging trends, and filter out trend signals. This allows you to make informed decisions and adjust the direction of your company's projects. By using AI technologies, you can gain deeper insight into the dynamics of trends and potentially gain a competitive advantage by reacting to changes early.
One such AI-integrated scouting and monitoring tool is the INNO-VERSE Innovation Compass . Here you have access to thousands of innovation examples that you can search specifically for your desired trends and industry. Alone or in a team, you can research the latest technologies and current events and, if you wish, add your own.
In addition, our CoCreator will also support you in the development of new ideas and groundbreaking innovations. This gives you the opportunity to have the CoCreator summarize the basic items you have selected and thus store the innovation compactly and easily in your research. There it can be used by your department or team to take your trend and innovation scouting to the next level.
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