What is technology scouting?
Technology scouting is the activity performed by innovation and research & development professionals to find technologies externally. It is an essential part of the recently popularised Open Innovation strategy, where R&D-professionals look externally for technical opportunities.
How does technology scouting work?
Depending on the importance of a R&D-challenge, innovation teams spend dozens, hundreds, or in rare cases even thousands of hours on the following channels to find the right technologies:
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In the old days, R&D driven companies developed technologies internally. From fundamental research to implementation, everything was in-house. Talking to colleagues and testing yourself was the only option. Sitting together in a meeting, or talking over a topic at the coffee machine might result in identifying the golden idea already. |
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Before building IGOR^AI, the Findest founders used to Google for hours in their nanotechnology scouting company. From their own experience, they thought finding dozens of technology options through traditional search engines it to be cumbersome and inefficient, as the search query could not be specified enough. |
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An important source of technical information is your current and potential suppliers. The benefit is that they might have seen your problem before, and even have a solution for it. The disadvantage is that typically just have one solution, so you don’t get the full overview. |
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Now technological development is going so fast, and finding the technologies costs less effort. Still conferences and fairs remain a good source of information. You get to see many suppliers in a certain field within hours. Resulting in a lot of inspiration and comparison material. Due to recent circumstances fairs and conferences are canceled, resulting in a potential knowlegde gap. |
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Science is an important source of new ideas and concepts to apply in industry. Proper science searching takes a lot of time. Time that typically isn't present in a commercial environment. By searching quickly yourself to get first insights, and collaborating with universities or interns, scientific articles can be a valuable source of technology information. |
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Patent search engines are very useful in eximining competitive activity, and researching freedom to operate. For ideation and technology scouting however, patents are often too broadly described and hard to interpret easily. The benefit is that this source is highly structured and open to explore. |
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You can also get help from external experts in finding technologies like the Findest technology scouts. |
