Innovation Forecast

Technology mapping and analysis with competitive technical intelligence depends on public disclosure of technically significant information.   What organization would do such a thing?   Answer.  Both large and small organizations!   BUT, you must be prepared to organize the disclosures AND you must be prepared to interpret the disclosures to make them tell a story.

What motivates organizations to disclose “sensitive” information?   Below are some of the forces. What other forces can you identify?  Please add a comment.

• Big business needs to convince investors that they are leaders and worthy of investment.  As a result, businesses publish useful information in press releases, annual reports and financial documents.
• Small businesses disclose information in order to raise money.
• Businesses seek patent protection for products and product improvements as a form of strategic advantage.
• Businesses publish to gain strategic advantage.
• Scientist and engineers are often evaluated on their publication and patenting frequency.  As a result, there is “pressure” from below to disclose technology information.
• Patenting and publishing timeframes are similar or shorter that product development cycles in many organizations.
• Others?

Competitive Technical Intelligence also benefits from the fact that scientific and patent information is very highly structured.   Patents and scientific papers have informative titles and abstracts.  Patents have claims which summarize the invention.  Papers have conclusions with a similar summary function.  The well structured formats make text mining and mapping fairly convenient.

In 1996, McGonagle and Vella (A New Archetype for Competitive Intelligence, Quorum Books, Westport Connecticut) published their thoughts on the organization of corporate intelligence.   Their thoughts are summarized in the table below.   My assessment of the impact of technology mapping and CTI methods are shown in the last column.

I believe that the impact of technology mapping and CTI on an organization can very broad.  Below are some thoughts on where a good technology map and competitive analysis can benefit organizations.

• Management can see why a project is not a leap of faith.
• Investors can see why the idea makes business sense and why it is strategically useful.
• Business Development can negotiate from a strong position, knowing more than the other side.
• Project Leaders can prove that ideas are fundamentally sound before proposing a project.
• Project Teams can judge new ideas and new information in an agreed upon context.

What other impacts have you experienced?

From my perspective competitive technical intelligence (CTI), strategic technology analysis, technology mapping and business analytics are almost synonyms.   CTI is a business process in which science and technology information is formulated to provide answers to business questions about

• new products,
• the readiness of technology for commercialization,
• M&A support and due diligence,
• technology investments,
• the basis for competition in an area and the
• readiness of competitors to actually compete.

From my perspective, technology mapping and business analytics are implicit in the CTI process.

Technology mapping is a form of business analytics.  Technology mapping is also a key process in competitive technical intelligence projects.   Technology mapping allows trends in technology to be visualized.  Once trends become visualized, it becomes easier for scientists, engineers and their managers or investors to jointly understand their options, to reach consensus on strategy and to take appropriate actions.  The result is better, more accurate and faster strategic technology decisions.

Strategic technology decisions will be even more important in the future.  The IBM 2008 CEO Study describes the enterprise of the future as “hungry for change, wildly imaginative, disruptive by nature and … wired into the people who matter the most”.   I believe that the enterprise of the future will also need to be fluent in CTI methods and the use of technology mapping to understand its options.   Organizations that actually implement this vision will be exciting places to work in the future.