6 steps to effective technology watch
Technology watch is an essential activity for all companies seeking to develop or maintain their competitive edge.
In today's fast-changing business environment, where many markets are subject to fierce competition, it is essential to keep abreast of emerging innovations, knowledge and know-how in one's sector of activity.
Properly conducted, monitoring is a powerful tool for any company wishing to strengthen its capacity for innovation. It makes it possible to gather relevant information at the right time, and to provide an overview of developments in a market, its players and its technologies, in order to inform decision-making. Its role is therefore eminently strategic.
What exactly are the challenges of technology watch? And how can you effectively implement this approach, whether you're part of a dedicated monitoring unit or a strategic corporate department? Let's explore these topics without further ado!
What is technology watch?
Definition of technology watch
Technology watch is a business intelligence activity. Among the various types of intelligence (commercial intelligence, competitive intelligence, etc.), it is a key component of strategic intelligence.
The purpose of technology watch is to gather and accumulate knowledge in order to map the market in which a company operates. It helps to :
- identify other companies and what they are doing,
- identify the players (competitors, partners, investors, suppliers, etc.) and their interactions,
- locate them geographically,
- check the evolution of standards,
- detect major trends, even anticipate future advances, etc.
It focuses in particular on developments and innovations of a technical or scientific nature. It may concern :
- products or services,
- manufacturing processes
- know-how,
- materials,
- information systems, etc.
The sectors concerned are generally those of cutting-edge technology, where the need to innovate is constant, but also those marked by strong research activity (such as aeronautics, pharmaceuticals, electronics, etc.).
Like all classic intelligence processes, it is based on several essential phases, which are described in greater detail below:
- searching for information,
- data collection,
- sorting and organizing information,
- study and analysis,
- dissemination of results.
Technology watch: examples of watch focus
Depending on the objectives set, a technology watch approach integrated into an innovation strategy can focus on different aspects. It can focus on :
- competition: competitive intelligence aims to observe the work carried out by rival companies, the products they market, competing industrial know-how and processes, etc. It analyzes :
- their competitive advantages,
- the strategies they deploy,
- patent databases, a valuable source of information on concrete advances in a sector.
- Research: R&D monitoring enables us to assess technologies in the development phase and their stage of evolution. It focuses on technical and scientific sources of information, such as :
- theses,
- current research projects,
- scientific studies and publications,
- data from research centers and universities.
- Markets: market intelligence enables us to represent all targeted markets in order to obtain an overview. It enables you to monitor :
- market trends,
- trends,
- upcoming changes in a technological sector.
- standardization: regulatory monitoring provides information on standards in force or in the process of being created. Companies in a given sector can form standardization committees, which enables them to monitor what is being introduced and to participate in the work aimed at establishing future standards.
The challenges of technology watch
Why technology watch? This activity is of fundamental importance for monitoring events likely to have a major influence on a business or sector of activity.
The issues at stake concern not only technology watch units, but also business units and strategic corporate departments (marketing, sales, finance, etc.), which have a strong interest in exploiting key information on technological developments.
Here are the main advantages
- a reliable, constantly-updated strategic information base;
- a better understanding of your environment, innovations in your sector and the relationships that make it up;
- observe what already exists and draw inspiration from it to innovate in turn: by identifying a gap or a need, finding solutions and opportunities for improvement;
- identify weak signals, before competitors do, so as to react quickly and agilely;
- make more informed choices and, depending on the situation, (re)define strategic orientations.
How to conduct technology intelligence? 6 steps to follow
Step 1: Identify your objectives
Whether you're setting up your watch or reorganizing it, start by determining your objectives by listing your needs in a document:
- Why are you keeping watch?
- What key information do you want to get out of it?
- targeted on a particular sector or business?
- on technologies?
- Price models?
- geographically?
- patents?
Choose your approach, bearing in mind that this information will feed into your various marketing, sales, innovation and other strategies .
So clarify your monitoring objectives and align them with your strategic priorities.
Step 2: Formalize monitoring activities
Once you've aligned your needs with your company's strategy, you need to formalize your monitoring activities, and in particular allocate the resulting tasks.
- Start by determining whether this monitoring function will be the role of full-time " watchers " associated with a company department (marketing, R&D, etc.), or that of external specialists, such as specialized monitoring centers. You can also opt for a hybrid approach.
- If you decide to run an in-house intelligence project, mobilize dedicated resources. The team you set up may include researchers, information specialists and documentalists, as well as scientific writers and analysts, who will be responsible for detecting, providing, analyzing and disseminating information.
- Put in place the means to access information. And start thinking about your knowledge management.
- Think collaborative! Monitoring will gain in relevance if it is carried out transversally and collectively, and if its results are effectively shared within the various departments, including management.
Step 3: List relevant sources of information
Next, determine where to put the spotlight of your research, based on your objectives: which areas, which key companies, which sectors, which technologies, etc.?
List all relevant sources of information for this purpose:
- trade magazines,
- expert articles and blogs,
- scientific publications,
- patent databases, such as that of the European Patent Office (Espacenet),
- conferences and trade shows, etc.
Faced with the sheer volume of information to be processed, you need to clearly define your search perimeter, so as to extract the most relevant and "actionable" information for your organization.
To do this as efficiently as possible, you can draw up an information collection plan to guide your research. Identify queries, starting from the broadest to the most precise, so as to refine them progressively, following a funnel logic.
Step 4: Use effective technology watch tools
A technology watch can be based largely on web-based tools. A number of best practices and interesting configurations can help you become more efficient:
- advanced search commands on search engines, to refine searches according to various parameters (document format, dates, essential keywords in the title, etc.) ;
- Google alert systems, to track specific keywords and be informed when new content related to these queries appears;
- Subscribe to newsletters to get a digest of essential information on interesting sites and blogs;
- RSS feed readers to keep track of new articles published from the same source;
- social network subscriptions, to be notified of the activity of the personalities and accounts you follow.
Specific tools, such as marketing intelligence software, can assist you in gathering information, but also in analyzing and exploiting the data.
Step 5: Analyze the information
For a technology watch to be relevant, it's not enough to collect a large amount of reliable, up-to-date information. It's essential to sort, store and organize it in such a way as to make it usable for your department and/or company.
Analyzing and synthesizing this information will give it meaning, so that it can be used for strategic purposes:
- what are the dynamics of a given sector?
- What are the threats in a given market?
- What opportunities exist?
- Is it the right time to launch new R&D activities?
- what investments can be made? etc.
Tools such as Geotrend's business intelligence platform help you to make your analyses more efficient and to rapidly capitalize on strategic information. Searching the web using supplied keywords, it compiles and valorizes essential data on your market and its ecosystem. The solution delivers ready-to-use results, in the form of a synthetic map, to speed up decision-making.
Step 6: Share results within the company
Once the analyses have been carried out, it's important to share the results within the company. Ask yourself what is the best way to do this, and how often, depending on the specific needs of your organization.
Intelligence information can be transmitted :
- Informative meetings with the departments concerned,
- during presentations to decision-makers,
- by means of a summary written and communicated to the whole company,
- via a shared press review, etc.
It may also be wise to consider the use of dedicated software to manage the collection, storage and transmission of information. For this, turn to collaborative tools such as :
- collaborative platforms
- knowledge management tools.
Activate your innovation potential with technology watch!
Whether the technology watch project is carried out in-house or entrusted to external specialists, its implementation requires methodology, rigor and organization.
The choice of high-performance tools will be decisive in collecting the most relevant information, storing it and disseminating it in an optimized way.
All that's left for you to do is switch to intelligence mode, and unleash your capacity for innovation!
Article translated from French