How to Uncover Trend and Technology Insights Faster Than the Pros

A good business strategy should outline a path for future success. This means your company must uncover emerging technologies and trends quickly to spot opportunities before the competition. But how do you ensure you’re effectively scanning and monitoring changes in your trend and tech landscape over time? ITONICS is making it easier and faster to research the forces impacting your business. Equip your foresight team with the ability to quickly derive, organize, and share insights for faster decision-making. Read on for our tips on AI tools that can speed up the process, how to get automated alerts when there’s a shift in a trend or technology, and finally, how to keep all your insights organized and up to date.  

Free custom AI assistants to research trends and technologies

The days are gone when you have to depend on costly trend and research agencies. You can now get quick answers with the help of custom AI assistants like those in our AI toolbox for innovation. Simply select which industry you’re interested in and click on Technologies, Startups, Trends, Pain Points, or Regulatory Changes. The assistant generates a table that you can copy over to a spreadsheet or upload to the ITONICS Innovation OS to assess it with your team.

6 questions to enrich your understanding of a trend or technology

1. What’s driving it?

Analyze the root causes of the trend. For a technology, consider its development to date and what’s driving its adoption. This helps in predicting its trajectory and longevity. The underlying factors could be technological advancements, shifts in consumer behavior, regulatory changes, environmental factors, or socio-economic shifts. Distinguish between trends driven by fleeting fads versus those rooted in fundamental changes.

2. What are the predictions for its future?

Consider how the trend or tech is expected to evolve, its potential growth or decline, and any anticipated shifts in direction. Understanding these predictions helps in making informed decisions about whether to adopt, invest, or prepare for the impacts.

3. What are the implications for innovation?

Think about how the trend or technology might necessitate innovation within your industry. It might inspire the development of new products, services, processes, or business models. Consider how it might create new opportunities or challenges for innovation, and what responses might be most effective.

4. What are the trends and tech related to it?

Explore adjacent trends and technologies that are connected to it. This gives you a more holistic view and helps identify potential collaborations,  technological integrations, or emerging sub-trends that may be significant.

5. How are other companies responding to it?

Research how other businesses, both within and outside your industry, are reacting to it. Are they modifying their strategy or investing in new technologies? Understanding their responses can give you ideas for best practices, potential partnerships, or gaps in the market that your business could fill.

6. How is it relevant to your business?

This is ultimately the crucial question. Relate the trend or technology back to your particular business. Consider how it aligns with your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Assess its relevance in terms of your internal know-how, customer base, market position, and long-term business goals. This will help determine its effect on your company’s innovation strategy.  

Best practice for enriching trends and emerging technologies

Our clients use the ITONICS Innovation OS to collect and relate trends and inspiring news. The recommended relations feature in ITONICS software helps them identify and link related trends and technologies in a workspace. This is handy when delving into your innovation portfolio because you can enrich trends and technologies through connections and relevant information.

The network graph visualizes the relations between trends and technologies in your workspace. It helps identify unknown knowns: relevant information that you’re unaware of, possibly because someone else in your company uploaded it in the past. You can discover related content based on shared tags and then use what you find to enrich your research.

When you open up a trend or technology element, you’ll see an auto-generated signals feed from sources including news, patents, and scientific publications. Our software lets you automate the monitoring of trends and technologies, because you’ll receive timely alerts for notable spikes or drops in media interest. The Strong Signals feature uses AI to generate summaries of news articles associated with key events so you can quickly interpret the implications of significant changes on the timeline graph.  

A major benefit of using an Innovation OS to centralize your insights is it makes it much easier to find what you’re looking for. Instead of struggling with scattered spreadsheets between different departments, companies using the ITONICS platform are able to manage innovation better. It brings everyone’s trend and technology insights together as standardized elements in the software, making it easier to find and compare information. Using the search bar is straightforward, but you can also use advanced filtering, to narrow down what you want displayed in our wide range of interactive visualizations.  

Organize your insights and innovate faster

The ITONICS Innovation OS simplifies the daunting task of keeping track of trends and emerging technologies. It breaks down information silos and aligns everyone’s efforts.  We provide a structured format for innovation insights that can easily be found, read, and compared by people across your company. Using a range of documents and spreadsheets for this purpose is slow and ineffective. Why not leap into the future with ITONICS? If you want to see for yourself how our Innovation OS can help streamline the way your company works and augment human expertise with AI, just book a demo and talk to our experts.