KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Start-up monitoring makes it possible to detect innovative companies and emerging technologies as soon as they appear.
- It helps identify partnership, investment, and innovation opportunities ahead of the competition.
- Effective start-up monitoring provides a clear view of players, markets, and innovation trends.
- Artificial intelligence makes it easier to analyze large volumes of information and detect weak signals.
Being able to detect new entrants to a market particularly early, or to identify innovative technologies, enables the detection of weak signals that are extremely useful to manufacturers of all sizes and to investors.
START-UP MONITORING: WHAT DOES IT INVOLVE?
Identifying partnership, investment, or development opportunities for new products or services is a key success factor for an innovation-driven company. In this context, start-up monitoring consists of:
- Detecting very early the emergence of new companies in a given sector,
- then systematically monitoring their economic, financial, commercial, and industrial news,
- and gaining a solid understanding of the challenges facing a sector and how they evolve over time.
But what exactly is a start-up?
At TKM, we consider a start-up to be any young company with high growth potential that uses or develops innovative technologies with disruptive potential, whether or not it has a strong need for external funding.
However, as part of monitoring dedicated to innovation, we are convinced that this definition needs to be broadened to include innovative SMEs.
Indeed, from a large corporation’s point of view, these companies also offer good innovation capacity and significant agility, while having non-negligible industrial, commercial, and financial maturity. For investors, this monitoring helps inform thinking around exit or M&A transactions.
START-UP MONITORING: WHAT IS IT FOR?
Understanding market dynamics is crucial for making informed strategic decisions. Start-up monitoring contributes to your ability to map the innovation ecosystem around your business, by identifying emerging players, their partnerships, and their activities at an early stage.
This mapping makes it possible to spot not only promising start-ups, but also to understand their relationships with other companies, the investors backing them, and the strategic alliances they are building.
This overall view allows you to anticipate market movements, seize good opportunities ahead of your competitors, and adjust your strategy accordingly.
Here are a few examples of the good uses of solid start-up monitoring…
Analyzing the innovation potential of an economic region
For local authorities, clusters, or business networks, carrying out start-up monitoring provides an overall view of the innovative companies in your geographic area or field of interest.
This monitoring, carried out on a larger scale, also allows you to position yourself in the competition for regional attractiveness, and to refine your understanding of the smart specialization strategies of major metropolitan areas or regions at national, European, or global level.
Driving and strengthening cooperation at the level of an economic region
Regions play a crucial role for technology start-ups looking for new opportunities, as well as for large companies constantly seeking innovation.
In the hands of a local authority, start-up monitoring also proves to be a decisive tool for connecting these players, creating business opportunities, and fostering job creation across your region.
Initiating collaborations
For large corporations, in a Open innovation or innovation detection approach, you will seek to understand, through start-ups, the innovation trends in your markets of interest.
From an R&D perspective, start-up monitoring makes it possible to detect new technologies, solutions to a technical problem your teams are facing, or approaches for optimizing a process or material currently in use.
Optimizing your investments and your investment portfolio
For investors, start-up monitoring is an essential tool for optimizing your portfolios. By detecting the emergence of young companies very early, then monitoring their funding rounds, the patents they file, as well as their news and commercial successes, you can identify and track the most promising companies.
With benchmark data on similar transactions carried out by other start-ups worldwide, and by supplementing the competitive review of your current investments or targets, you increase your chances of selecting start-ups with high growth potential.
This monitoring also allows investors to identify potential exits, whether through partners or co-investors who come in at later funding rounds, or by identifying other start-ups for a build-up.
Increasing your chances of raising funds quickly
For a start-up, this monitoring first helps you find other start-ups with which to initiate collaborations. Usefully maintaining your young company’s profile on a monitoring platform also boosts your visibility with large corporations and investors.
If you are preparing a fundraising round or are in a strategic review, start-up monitoring gives you a much more complete view of your competitors, their application markets, as well as the funding rounds they have completed and the investors active in your market.
This in-depth knowledge of your sector and your competitors is essential for structuring your value proposition, refining your fundraising strategy, and being word-perfect in front of investors when pitching your project.
THE “START-UP” MODULE: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FOR EFFECTIVE START-UP MONITORING
The “Start-up” module of the TKM platform makes it possible to detect and assess innovative start-ups and SMEs in order to spot trends, emerging technologies, and partnership opportunities. Track their news, patents, and progress to stay at the forefront of innovation.
With more than 220,000 start-ups listed in France and internationally, TKM Platform – Start-ups lets you search for and analyze the key players in a given field of activity or technology, according to your criteria of interest.
How does it work?
Based on artificial intelligence that extracts and enriches relevant information from the systematic monitoring it carries out across the Web’s strategic sectors, the “Start-up” module gives you access to a comprehensive and detailed view of start-ups worldwide, across all sectors.
Where does the information on start-ups come from?
The start-up monitoring platform continuously scans the Web and captures useful information it detects on sites covering technology and start-up news: incubators or accelerators, trade shows, conferences, thematic directories, as well as the specialist press, investor sites, global scientific and technology information databases, financial information sources…
TKM has thus woven a gigantic web. Its algorithms then make it possible to detect all potentially relevant information, sort it, filter it, and format it to make it accessible in a summarized form online in your dedicated area of the platform.
With an annual subscription, you get access to the online platform and, in just a few clicks, you can:
- Access the global start-up database: access information on more than 220,000 start-ups across all sectors and follow their news.
- Define custom scopes: your “landscapes” – an experienced monitoring analyst will help you define the precise scope of the companies that interest you (field of activity, technology, geographic area, etc.). You will then have a dynamic start-up map matching your criteria, personalized monitoring, and, at year end, a trend report on your favorite topics.
- Automated monitoring: in just a few clicks, you can set up alerts on your favorite companies, on your landscapes, or on events of particular interest to you (funding round, filing of a new patent, participation in a trade show, etc.).
Why define monitoring scopes?
If you run R&D at a company in the medical field, you probably won’t find it useful to monitor start-ups in the nuclear or aerospace industries. This is why, with TKM Platform, you can define your preferred monitoring scopes and be kept informed as a priority about them.
This is what we call a “Landscape”. It lets you group together and instantly find all the information on the companies and sectors that matter to you.
Set up as many Landscapes as you need, and don’t hesitate to draw on our more than 20 years of expertise to help you! Selecting by keywords and technology fields can quickly become complex: TKM is here to support you.
Every quarter, you’ll receive directly in your inbox a summary of news from your Landscapes (newly created start-ups, funding rounds, etc.). You can also add specific start-ups to your favorites, follow their news in real time, and be notified of interesting information!
Easily collect and structure the data
Once the scope has been defined, TKM collects data scattered across the Web through various formal and informal sources. Skopai’s artificial intelligence algorithms organize this data to provide a complete profile of each start-up. This includes information on patents, partnerships, funding rounds, and other critical data.
A visual indicator lets you quickly assess a technology’s maturity level using the TRL scale (Technology Readiness Level), as well as its commercial maturity and investment maturity level.
Share your monitoring results internally or with your partners
The platform’s collaborative feature lets you work together with your colleagues, share useful information with them, analyze it, and so feed your innovation strategies. The “Start-up” module of TKM Platform also makes it easy to export your research results in Excel format, making it easier to share and carry out further analysis.
Carrying out start-up monitoring is essential to remaining competitive. However, this task can prove complex and time-consuming without the right tools.
TKM is the ideal tool for feeding your Open Innovation processes, steering your investment strategies, nurturing your R&D strategies, getting to know your competitors, or analyzing the innovation strength of an economic region.
By using TKM Platform – “Start-up” Module, you can not only save time, but also make more informed strategic decisions.
THE CHALLENGES OF EFFECTIVE START-UP MONITORING
Start-up monitoring comes with several challenges that can make it complex.
The volume of information to monitor in order to detect start-ups is immense, and the sources are scattered across a multitude of sites. Information noise – that is, the amount of irrelevant data among everything your monitoring areas report daily – further complicates the task and requires powerful (AI) tools for filtering and sorting. In addition, information on start-ups evolves very quickly, which means the data you have can quickly become outdated.
To overcome these challenges and make your start-up monitoring useful without taking up too much of your time, it has become necessary to equip yourself with powerful, specialized tools.
💡 Did you know?
30 billion: that’s the average number of pieces of information you would have to process each year if you decided to monitor only the websites of finance and investment professionals worldwide.
VISUALIZE
THE ECOSYSTEM
STAY ON TOP OF
INNOVATIONS
IDENTIFY
NEW ENTRANTS
DETECT
START-UPS
QUALIFY
START-UPS
MONITOR
DEALS
Investing in a high-performing start-up monitoring tool means giving yourself the means to seize innovation opportunities ahead of the competition and build a solid, sustainable innovation strategy.
Want to get ahead of the game?