Although access to information has never been easier, it is paradoxically becoming more and more difficult to stay well informed, due to the explosion in the volume of information available.
That said, technology-intelligence-monitoring work remains essential for any company looking to build and maintain its competitive advantage.
In this context, how can you keep up with the latest innovations effectively without devoting all your time to it? After a quick refresher on the theory, here is our advice for successful technology intelligence monitoring.
TECHNOLOGY INTELLIGENCE MONITORING: DEFINITION
Technology intelligence monitoring is one of the various types of monitoring that contribute to the competitive intelligence a company needs to deploy, and is part of the broader framework of strategic intelligence monitoring.
What is technology intelligence monitoring?
More specifically, technology intelligence monitoring relates to observing and making use of technical, technological and/or scientific information useful for the strategic decision-making of innovative companies. The main steps that structure it are collecting, analyzing and disseminating this qualified information.
Technology intelligence monitoring makes it possible to identify technical innovations, new products/services or competitors, or new knowledge arising from academic research.
Every sector is affected: manufacturing, healthcare, energy, transportation, cosmetics… Technology intelligence monitoring is all the more essential for businesses with high Research and Development (R&D) intensity and strong innovation needs, from start-ups to large groups, including SMEs and mid-sized companies.
WHY DO TECHNOLOGY INTELLIGENCE MONITORING?
Technology intelligence monitoring is, in principle, at the heart of innovative organizations’ strategic decisions. It allows a company to:
- Track its competitors’ activity, or detect new ones (coming from different technical fields)
- Anticipate their upcoming innovations and react in time
- Have a very precise view of their patent filings and counter them in time where applicable
- Master its technological environment.
- Identify the weak signals that herald new technologies
- Detect threats and opportunities in time
- Find the right partners, or even clients in some cases
HOW DO YOU IMPLEMENT AN EFFECTIVE TECHNOLOGY-INTELLIGENCE-MONITORING PROCESS?
Setting up intelligence monitoring is not something you improvise. Here are the 6 steps we recommend following to act methodically and spend just the right amount of time on it:
- Define the monitoring focus areas and deliverables : First, you need to determine the objectives of the monitoring (why?) and the key information you want to get out of your monitoring work. Depending on whether you’re looking to get data on available technologies, feed your patent-filing strategy, or anticipate your competitors’ moves, your approach will differ.
- Define the monitoring focus areas and deliverables : Organize your monitoring. Is this a one-off monitoring effort (a state of the art, for example, or a patent landscape) or ongoing monitoring to set up? Do you have the resources to carry out this monitoring work in-house, or is it better to use outside consultants? What internal scientific skills do you need to call on? What tools do you already have? And what tools would you need (database, analysis, dissemination…)?
- Define the monitoring focus areas and deliverables : Identify the sources. Where is the information that might interest you located? In patent databases, scientific publications? On the web, in the business press? The difficulty is that it’s sometimes hard to know where the information is before you’ve looked for it… Without a dedicated tool, you may be forced to narrow your search scope, to avoid being swamped by a mass of irrelevant information.
- Define the monitoring focus areas and deliverables : Collect the information. In connection with the strategic question you want to answer, you’ll build a search strategy with the right keywords linked by Boolean operators (And, Or, Not, Proximity…). Unfortunately, even with a finely tuned keyword selection, you may quickly find yourself facing a large number of relevant documents.
- Define the monitoring focus areas and deliverables : Analyze and summarize the information. Once the information has been sorted, stored and made usable, it now needs to be made sense of. What trends are observed, and how should they be interpreted? In which fields are competitors innovating? Are there new players? What are the notable opportunities and threats? …
- Define the monitoring focus areas and deliverables : Make use of the monitoring results. Finally comes the time to share and disseminate the information collected. Forget hard-to-digest Excel spreadsheets: use data visualization to present your results in a readable, engaging way. Good formatting will make it easier for your colleagues or management to make interesting connections and come up with ideas worth exploring. Conversely, slogging through 80 Chinese patents can quickly discourage even the most determined…
TECHNOLOGY INTELLIGENCE MONITORING: 3 CHALLENGES TO TACKLE
Finding the right information in the age of information overload
Every year, across all fields combined, several million data points are produced worldwide, via a multitude of different sites or databases, structured or not. The risk today is missing a piece of information, a decisive weak signal.
The arrival of the internet may have led us to believe that, because information is now very easily accessible, intelligence monitoring would be easier to do, and that everyone would be able to do their own monitoring.
Except that with the mass of information now available, it has become extremely complex to access the right information: the kind that has a strategic impact. The challenge, then, is to give yourself the means to select relevant information, independently of the noise and the mass of information to be processed.
It is also essential for the company to be able to build on the fruits of this monitoring over time. Otherwise, every time an employee leaves, an entire piece of knowledge disappears, taking with it a substantial share of an R&D or industrial-property team’s intangible assets.
Giving intelligence monitoring back its full strategic dimension
Despite its strategic nature, technology intelligence monitoring is still too often the poor relation within companies.
In large groups, it is not uncommon for monitoring work to fall to engineers, on top of their R&D duties. As a result, they simply don’t have the time to handle it properly. And even when a company has dedicated monitoring analysts, they are most often swamped with varied requests and face a multitude of topics to handle.
In addition to standard monitoring topics, they increasingly have to respond to ad hoc requests and struggle to keep up the pace. Without methods and tools suited to this new context, technology intelligence monitoring cannot be efficient.
Equipping yourself with the right technology-intelligence-monitoring tools
Web monitoring, access to databases with an alert system, patent databases, crawlers, scrapers… To carry out their monitoring work, analysts most often rely on single-source monitoring tools.
Tools that, taken individually, do not allow for 360° monitoring of your technological environment. You therefore have to multiply subscriptions and analyses. Not to mention that access to databases is expensive, and every new subscription has to be justified.
Fortunately, there are now technological alternatives available to simplify and optimize monitoring work, such as the one offered by our intelligence-monitoring and analysis software platform.
A multi-source monitoring tool, TKM Platform is a SaaS monitoring and analysis software perfectly suited to the new challenges of technology intelligence monitoring.
TKM Platform is able to process and analyze data and documents from the entire body of scientific and technological literature: patents, scientific articles, collaborative projects, theses, start-ups, the web…
Designed to foster collaboration in order to put intelligence monitoring back at the heart of companies’ decision-making process, this cutting-edge platform makes it possible to classify, detect and comment on every piece of information and share it with a single click.
Its analysis and data-visualization tools let a user build a solid understanding of a field’s challenges in just a few hours!