For companies engaged in open or collaborative innovation, having the ability to understand your ‘innovation landscape’ is critical. There are several different ways you can approach innovation landscaping, but the goal of landscaping is always the same: to find out what you don’t know.
There are four basic types of landscaping:
Conceptual/knowledge landscapes
In terms of ideation and idea refinement, conceptual or knowledge-based landscaping enables you to find any and all information related to your topic area. This goes far beyond regular search engines and goes through global IP, literature resources, academic research libraries, deep web and more to layout all of the relevant bodies of knowledge for a given topic. Access to the deep web means that you can see content from the substantial portion of the World Wide Web that is not indexed or searched by traditional search engines.
Using the inno360 platform, once you have done a search, you can then sort through content based on a variety of factors (i.e. geography, year, institution, keyword, etc.) and find new ideas and relationships using dynamic visualization and analytics features that show potential adjacencies. By doing this in-depth type of landscaping, you know you have a full understanding of what is out there and aren’t missing some key piece of information from some foreign lab across the globe.
Technology landscapes
If you are a bit further along in the innovation process and have an idea related to a specific technology in mind, doing a technology landscape can provide an enormous amount of value. By doing an extensive semantic search of global resources, you gain a clear view of what technologies are on the market, what technologies are in development, who is developing what, who holds IP for what, etc.—helping to dramatically accelerate the innovation/product development process. For example, you may want to take a new product to market but need to develop a specific technology first. By doing a technology landscape, you may find out the technology you need has already been developed by another company who is willing to license it to you or collaborate in some way. Or, you may do a technology landscape and find a lot of recent activity in a certain area (new IP, published research, etc.), giving you the ability to forecast market need.
Thought leader/expertise landscape
Sometimes you need knowledge to get things done; other times you need people. By doing a thorough global search of the individuals and experts involved in a given topic or product area, you know that when it comes time to pick collaboration partners, you are working with the best of the best. The inno360 platform allows you to not only see who has expertise in what areas but its dynamics visualization and analytics features also allow you to see the relationships various individuals have with patents, institutions, technologies and more.
Competitive landscape
One of the biggest concerns for companies engaged in open innovation is risk. Anytime you try to develop a new product, there is always going to be a chance that your competitor comes up with something better or faster than you do. By conducting an extensive competitive landscape you can quickly determine if the product area you are attempting to go into is already saturated by a competitor and identify places where you stand to gain a competitive advantage. In terms of ROI, this is one area where an innovation management platform like inno360 provides enormous value by saving you from spending thousands or even millions on research and development of a product that turns out to be obsolete.
For more on the value of an innovation management platform, read, The ROI of Innovation. Feel free to contact us with any questions.