How Industry Leaders Speed up Environmental Scanning with ITONICS

According to the 2021 Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for Innovation Management Techniques, AI-driven innovation holds potentially transformative means to “drive high-impact innovation at scale through the discovery of new ideas and rapid progress through the innovation pipeline.” For several organizations, scaling environmental scanning solutions that will enhance the process without losing time and quality efficiencies is still a battle. This is where AI can come into play. 

With AI-based text mining, organizations can accelerate the process of analyzing and sifting through complex data for quicker and more efficient decision-making.

ITONICS has helped many multinational organizations enhance their environmental scanning by using human intelligence augmented with the benefits of our software. With the ITONICS Innovation OS, our clients are equipped to identify the current market challenges, anticipate new emerging scenarios, and plan and drive the future with corporate innovation roadmaps. The ITONICS software integrates data-driven techniques into an end-to-end innovation management process, empowering companies to make fact-based decisions and generate robust innovation strategies. Our unique AI-based approach enables our clients to scan millions of verified sources quicker to reveal relevant themes and potential competitive advantages.

→ Explore how to accelerate your Environmental Scanning Activities with ITONICS Insights

How the ITONICS Innovation OS Supports Data-Driven Environmental Scanning for Innovation

The ITONICS Innovation OS is designed to streamline the entire innovation ecosystem, from discovering weak signals to strategic decision-making, facilitating a complete innovation process. With our software solution, our clients are able to conduct their research with great preciseness, obtaining results that cater to their personal requirements. For a robust and efficient environmental scanning, our Innovation OS empowers organizations with these three capabilities:

1. Understanding Key Emerging Changes and Tracking Developments over Time

For many organizations we are working with, the most challenging part often is monitoring the evolution of a particular trend or technology. To demonstrate how ITONICS can help overcome this challenge and improve an organization's overall environmental scanning process, we take the example of a multinational apparel company. Looking to digitize its end-to-end creation process, the company wanted to dig into the emerging technologies that would help them achieve this goal. They were also interested in gaining an insight into the existing technologies they used with regard to recent developments surrounding those technologies.

ITONICS Insights was an excellent entry point to begin the exploratory research into the topic. Our Insights module has a regularly-updated reservoir of more than 22 million signals to help organizations detect emerging market patterns in relation to their socio-economic, political, technological, and strategic interests. The apparel company’s conventional research method to inspect granular technologies was proving to be a chaotic undertaking. By consolidating all research efforts into a single platform, the ITONICS platform resolved the disorder in the process. The unified approach to research, made possible by our system, significantly reduced redundancy and complexity.

In addition, our advanced query option enabled the client to dive deeper into the technologies, look into their evolution, and extract the granularity they were looking for. The advanced query is a feature in ITONICS Insights that can further refine the results by allowing users to formulate their own presets. These presets can range from a simple single query to a more complex compound query, giving them direct control of the depth they want in their research. Presets can also be saved, making it possible to track the development of particular information over time. Users can also combine multiple presets with the logical operators AND and OR to uncover hidden connections or validate/refute hypotheses. More importantly, the saved presets are accessible to all members working in the same workspace, enabling a unified innovation effort.

2. Identifying Business Opportunities

The apparel company wanted to investigate only the newest and most relevant technologies to facilitate its digitization goal. Their requirements also entailed searching for new startups, industry partnerships, and competitor activities concerning end-to-end digitization technologies. Moreover, the company had specific requirements regarding the quality of the results in terms of time, geographical positioning, and credibility.

ITONICS Insights is fortunately equipped with features that allow our clients to set a custom time range, select sources of articles, and even do country-wise research for a more refined and custom result. With this flexibility, the apparel company could attain its research objectives without the friction that a conventional research method would generate.

In addition, with the ITONICS Radar, the company integrated the collected data into various visualization tools for a quick, tailor-made view of how the drivers of change are impacting their internal and external business environments. By indicating the tipping point of emerging trends and technologies, the Radar also acts as an early-warning system in the strategy-making process.

The ITONICS Innovation OS also comes with the most up-to-date market trends and technologies portfolio, which can be extremely helpful in discovering and defining growth opportunities for organizations. Assembled by our team of highly experienced business analysts, these trends and technologies go through contextualized analysis and evaluation to provide an accurate view of the current market scenario.

3. Communicating with Team Members and Reporting to Stakeholders

The ITONICS Innovation OS is designed to allow for an organized and transparent collaboration between functions and departments, enabling effective interdepartmental sharing of information. Our software makes it possible for multiple team members to do collaborative scouting by working in the same workspace. As a result, the multinational apparel company from our example observed consistency in the research process, reduced complexity, and improved internal alignment.

Our software can provide extensive insights by synthesizing millions of data sources, including scientific articles, patents, and news. Users can connect these insights to other information and processes in our Innovation OS to generate strategies that achieve their innovation goals. Once the system helps innovation teams identify opportunities and gaps, they can easily make connections between information to help portfolio managers with aggregated views on innovation programs and projects. Important decisions are made easier with quick and transparent views. Companies can then identify and map out necessary actions using the ITONICS Roadmap.

Organizations must perform continuous environmental scanning to know where to position their purpose, process, product, and people to gain a competitive advantage. A systematic search for signals of change relies on an organized flow of data that can easily be translated into knowledge. With the ITONICS innovation management platform, organizations can benefit from an AI-powered scouting system to enable a more well-rounded, holistic innovation management effort.

Not yet convinced? Discover in our How-To Guide the use cases of ITONICS Insights to help you optimize your environmental scanning process!