8 Features to Stay Updated on Developments: Trends, Technologies, Startups, Risks

If you're not keeping up with the latest developments, it’s likely your competitors are. Being up to date on developments helps you stay ahead of the competition and ensure that your products or services are relevant and cutting-edge.

The benefits and common obstacles in staying on top of developments 

Keeping yourself well-informed on developments helps you identify new opportunities to innovate. By staying abreast of new trends, technologies, startups, risks, and competitor developments, you can identify gaps in the market and new problems that need solving. It can reveal new tools and technologies that will help streamline your processes and increase efficiency. This can save time and money, ultimately improving your bottom line. The aim is to understand your customers and their needs better, anticipate shifts in their behavior and preferences, and adapt your offerings accordingly.

To do game-changing innovation, it is essential to stay updated with developments. But these common pain points can be an obstacle:

1. Information overload: With the vast amount of information available online, it can be challenging to filter through the noise and identify what is relevant and valuable. It is a challenge keeping up with the latest news, trends, and technologies, then knowing what to focus on.
2. Time constraints: It requires significant time to read, attend events, and engage with online communities while managing other responsibilities.
3. Rapid pace of change: New technologies and trends emerge quickly, so staying on top of everything can be challenging.
4. Bias and misinformation: With the proliferation of fake news and misinformation online, it is difficult to separate fact from fiction. It's essential to identify trustworthy sources of information and be aware of potential biases.
5. Technical complexity: Innovations and new technologies often require a deep understanding of technical concepts and jargon, which may be intimidating without a background in the field.

8 tips to keep up to date with developments more easily with ITONICS

These eight features in the ITONICS Innovation OS equip global teams to keep up to date with constant changes in any industry.

1. Use pre-researched, validated, and curated trends and technologies

ITONICS provides access to a curated collection of trends, emerging technologies, and inspiring real-world examples of innovation. Our analyst team has researched, evaluated, and updated this collection so that you can use it to kickstart your own environmental scanning. Explore these trends and technologies, then enrich them with your team’s opinions to make it relevant to your business.

2. Monitor your drivers of change with ITONICS Insights

New trends and technologies do not emerge overnight. Use ITONICS Insights to search for Signals, indicators of potential future change. Signals point to new developments, implications for innovation, and possible opportunities or threats. The Signals Feed is a collection of the latest news articles, patents, and scientific publications sourced from thousands of verified online sources. Search and identify Signals that are relevant to your business, then link them to trends and technologies in the system.

3. Follow the content you are interested in - get notified when something changes

The ITONICS Innovation OS keeps you informed about developments on trends and technologies you’re interested in, with notifications in the software and via email.  Choose to follow a particular content element and you’ll receive updates on everything that happens within it. This keeps you in the loop and supports you in monitoring drivers of change.

4. Recommended content

The ITONICS software suggests commonality links between content to help you quickly recognize relationships and dependencies. The recommender engine uses machine learning techniques to compute a similarity score between your specific element and all other elements within the workspace. This enriches and validates your innovation portfolio by easily linking relevant information.  

5. Share specific views

When you want to get input from your colleagues and collaborate in innovation management software, you need to be able to look at the same information across the system. Users in ITONICS can save filtered views that they’ve configured to their specific interests. They can then get back to it quickly at any time and share the saved view with colleagues to strengthen common understanding. Shared views facilitate collaboration between team members, allowing them to discuss and evaluate developments and ensuring that decisions are based on timely information.

6. Explore hidden gems and connect the dots

The Network Graph visualization in the ITONICS Explorer shows connections between elements. It can reveal hot topics and hidden gems, based on the strength of their links to each other. This is a useful method to reveal unknown knowns when doing environmental scanning.

For instance, if you want a new perspective on the connection between trends, risks, and technologies, select multiple element types and configure the Network Graph to use shared tags as the basis for links. The elements now rearrange in the graph based on the number of tags they share and can be valuable to understand connections between developing technologies, risks, and trends.

7. Knowledge sharing

ITONICS enables you to share knowledge and insights with your team members, partners, and stakeholders. Create a workspace on the ITONICS platform that serves as a single source of truth for your organization. Then encourage colleagues to enrich and rate elements as a  way of sharing their opinions and expertise. Sparking discussions on the potential impact of trends and technologies can draw in your whole organization to participate and stay informed on developments in the market.

8. Leverage the power of the crowd to stay in the know

Tap into collective intelligence to highlight areas, ideas, and developments that you may not be aware of. With ITONICS Ideation, you can invite colleagues or experts to submit ideas through the platform and users can evaluate their relevance with ratings. You can even use ITONICS Open Innovation to move beyond organizational boundaries, and get external input. Startups, universities, or large enterprises can see your company’s field of interest and challenges, then submit proposals that expand your horizons.

Your single point of truth for innovation

A major benefit of the ITONICS Innovation Operating System is that it is an end-to-end solution. Instead of you and your colleagues using a range of different tools for foresight, environmental scanning, ideation, open innovation, portfolio management, or roadmapping, ITONICS centralizes it on one platform. It becomes a single point of truth to unify your company’s innovation activities, instead of scattered efforts that may result in important developments falling through the cracks.

Our innovation management software offers an efficient way to centralize and maintain up-to-date data related to trends, emerging technologies, startups, competitors, opportunities, scenarios, idea challenges, and innovation projects. Its exporting and embedding functionalities allow you to keep off-platform stakeholders in the loop with customized reports and interactive visualizations placed on your organization’s intranet. ITONICS helps you keep your teams aligned and stakeholders informed on the latest developments.

Have more time?

• Watch How to use ITONICS to monitor trends & technologies
• Read 4 Ways to Increase Cross-Collaboration in Trend & Technology Scouting
• Listen to the podcast episode The Realist’s Guide to Emerging Technologies