In this context, proactive intelligence monitoring should ideally make it possible to perceive what others cannot yet see. But how can you manage to spot, within an ever-growing mass of information, the weak signal that heralds a significant change?
By adopting the right methodology and equipping yourself with the right tools. Here’s how.
WEAK SIGNALS: DEFINITION
A weak signal is a low-intensity piece of information, or an inference drawn from an isolated fact or partial information, which, once amplified, can feed forward-looking strategic thinking aimed at anticipating a crisis or its impacts on the company.
It makes it possible to anticipate an event (or a series of events) well before its occurrence clearly becomes obvious to all observers.
A weak signal can slip through the cracks of an internal monitoring system without its strategic value being noticed. During an after-action review, it sometimes turns out, in hindsight, that we had in hand all the (low-intensity) warning signs pointing to a competitor’s launch of a highly innovative or highly disruptive product.
A weak signal is indeed potentially carrying a key piece of information whose highly strategic nature may not seem obvious at this stage to most of the people who have that information in hand.
A weak signal thus refers to:
- Information that will not present any useful strategic character for 99% of people
- But that will have an impact on a business / a sector / a technology field
Good to know: Credit for the concept of the weak signal can be attributed to Igor Ansoff in the 1970s; it was then picked up and expanded on in France by Professor Humbert Lesca, Professor Emeritus at the University of Grenoble, as part of his work on anticipatory strategic intelligence monitoring (VAS).
Weak signals: two examples
In 2014, the whole world discovered the Apple Watch!
What a surprise? Probably not for a well-informed observer, who had had the opportunity, from the early 2000s onward, to watch the American giant’s growing interest in “wearable technologies”, illustrated by a few acquisitions and then by the filing of several patents specific to “wearable electronic devices” as early as 2011.
As this example illustrates, it is the convergence of several distinct, partial pieces of information that can give rise to an intuition, the start of a line of thinking for the analyst. At this stage, you can obviously still be wrong and see meaning where there may not be any.
Another example: the emergence of virtual reality.
In an analysis carried out in 2015, TKM traced the emergence of virtual reality and its industrial applications, by analyzing the scientific publications produced by hundreds of researchers worldwide over the previous 20 years.
The different “building blocks” that make up virtual reality were, at the start of the period, the subject of completely independent research work. Then more and more projects started looking at the connections between these fields (video capture, geolocation, computing power, digital models…). These connections intensified, leading, from the year 2000 onward, to the emergence of virtual reality as a field in its own right, whose subsequent rise everyone is familiar with.
An observer paying close attention to the evolving content of these scientific publications could thus reasonably gain a valuable head start and lead time over their competitors.
These examples illustrate an important point: detecting a weak signal by itself is not enough. It must be investigated, validated and verified. You need to be able to find other signals that will, where appropriate, allow this weak signal to be turned into a clear signal.
➡️ Join our webinar “How to detect and make use of weak signals?
WHY IS IT ESSENTIAL TO PAY ATTENTION TO WEAK SIGNALS?
A technological breakthrough can also constitute a weak signal that will usefully feed a proactive innovation strategy. For example, the fact that it is now possible to graft micro-LEDs onto textile on an industrial scale may give an R&D manager in automotive interior design the intuition that there is something innovative to invent.
What’s more, the same weak signal can be a sign of:
- An opportunity: by quickly seizing on the weak signal, you can be among the first to grab the new application that results from it.
- A threat: this same weak signal can herald the arrival of new entrants in a given market.
Either way, to avoid being “Uberized” by more innovative competitors, it is essential to give yourself the means to identify weak signals in time, so you can then decide what you want to do with them.
➡️ Also read – Strategic intelligence monitoring: how to spot opportunities and threats in time?
HOW DO YOU AVOID MISSING A WEAK SIGNAL DURING INTELLIGENCE-MONITORING WORK?
By definition, a weak signal can come from extremely varied places. It may surface during highly focused monitoring of a very specific topic, come out of the findings of a working group on how a standard is evolving, emerge from a competitor’s patent, or come from a technical, industrial or economic world very far removed from your own. A weak signal can thus be detected just as easily in your everyday field as it can come from a completely unrelated world. And that is the whole complexity of the exercise!
It is therefore important not to limit your intelligence monitoring to your core business, but to keep an eye on: indirect competitive intelligence monitoring, megatrends, start-up monitoring, regulatory monitoring, financial monitoring, etc…
In the field of innovation, patent databases and scientific publications — obviously —, but also collaborative projects, theses, web articles… are essential sources for technology and scientific intelligence monitoring worthy of the name.
However, in today’s context of information overload, searching for a weak signal can quickly feel like looking for a needle in an enormous haystack!
To keep your monitoring unit from getting lost in a maze of uninteresting information, it’s important to equip it with the right monitoring tools.
TKM PLATFORM: THE MULTI-SOURCE INTELLIGENCE-MONITORING TOOL THAT CHANGES THE GAME
Human intuition is key in the process of identifying a weak signal. A generic AI will not be enough to make sense of isolated pieces of information the way a human can. On the other hand, AI can greatly help synthesize and quickly build an initial level of intelligence on a given field, and thereby make it possible to monitor distant fields.
It is in this spirit that TKM’s software platform was designed.
Thanks to its information search and synthesis mechanisms, these tools let analysts reduce the time spent analyzing the existing mass of information, while enabling the phenomenon of de-fixation.
In other words, thanks to our platform, companies can break out of their dominant thinking patterns, to look at fields that were previously distant, but potentially carrying weak signals and sources of interesting opportunities!
With TKM Platform, it becomes possible to monitor every possible field,
without devoting all your time to it.
Would you like to learn more about how it works?