Open Innovation - Portals, Mapping and Scouting
| Best-in-class companies are twice as likely as their industry average to have open innovation processes in place. IFT's Open Innovation solutions enable you to reach out to experts, partners, suppliers and inventors to broadcast marketing or R&D search themes or challenges, capture idea and technology submissions and collaborate on developing powerful new concepts to feed your innovation process. All this in a managed and controlled way.
The result is immediate access to a vast new network of idea submitters to fill your pipeline with great new ideas and technology proposals, along with the automated tools to quickly and effectively sort, manage and evaluate the potentially high volume of submissions.
IFT's offer two solutions to help you making Open Innovation more operational: - Innovation Portal "à la P&G" 3. Innovation Scouting Services
- Innovation Scouting Software
| | 1 - IFT's Innovation Portal "à la P&G" | IFT's innovation portal solution combines our innovation management solution and its unique, patented correlation engine with a fully integrated, collaborative web portal to source ideas, insights and technology proposals. Specifically, IFT's solution enables you to create an open innovation process to: | Launch an open innovation website, with a direct link from your corporate or business website Define strategic arenas for each of your businesses, and identify search themes or challenges for each strategic arena Broadcast challenges through the open innovation website and through targeted emails to your open innovation subscribers, customer and supplier lists and inventor networks Define straightforward workflows and alerts for how different types of idea will be captured, developed and evaluated Enable open innovation participants to submit insights and ideas related to challenges Support collaborative development of ideas and communication between innovation internal participants Capture structured idea and technology proposal information and unstructured information (comments, expert advice, documents, links, etc.) as the idea develops | | Retain all ideation information in an Ideation Bank, used for automated correlation and clustering as well as manual search Automatically identify and connect employees who share common areas of interest and similar insights and ideas Automatically cluster proposals by correlated content to further develop ideas and technologies Evaluate proposals using pre-defined business criteria and weighted scoring Keep open innovation participants informed of the status of their submissions, and facilitate communications between submitter and evaluator Generate performance metrics and dashboards to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the approach Integrate the open innovation process and system seamlessly with your new product development process | | | 2 - Innovation Scouting Software | While most companies are doing technology watch and competitive intelligence, technology scouting has a pro-active process is relatively new. Based on our experience of the Front-end of innovation process, we have defined a set of key best practices that are now fully embedded in our approach and software solution.
- Start by defining a list of technology domains in which you want your scouting efforts to concentrate on.
This list must be derived from your innovation strategy and from your technology challenges and priorities. - Formally engage multi-disciplinary teams (marketing, R&D, industrial operations, etc) to each domain to conduct scouting and technology assessments. You do not need dedicated staff to do scouting but need to make sure that your existing teams have specific time allocated to those activities
- Leverage the different sources of information available to look for relevant partners and technologies.
While conferences, patents database and web searches are most commonly used, IFT has identified a new generation of expert and technologies profiling tools. - Allow collaboration to take place around scouting results; by facilitating meaningful connections between potential technologies, customer insights and people, you will identify quicker your most promising proposals.
- Establish overall common governance and process rules to assess technologies, to prioritize them and to integrate them in the current portfolio of R&D work.
- Don't stop there and make sure you build a searchable catalog to capitalize on all technologies assessed. Remember that some technologies disregarded today may be necessary tomorrow as new market needs and challenges appear.
IFT-FEI Technology Scouting's solution facilitates this process by providing key functionalities in 2 main areas: | | Technology identification, nurturing and assessment | | Create targeted technology domains and challenges, and shared them with targeted teams Define collaborative workflows for how technologies should be captured, nurtured and evaluated Import technology candidates from technology watch or patent search tools Capture structured technology information (description, value proposition, risks, competitive intelligence, etc.) and unstructured information (comments, expert advice, documents, links, etc.) along the scouting process Assess and prioritize technologies using pre-defined business criteria: technical feasibility, business attractiveness, Capex level, partner ability Manage portfolio of technologies: balance, prioritize and decide (Ignore, Park, Explore further, Move to Development, etc.) Generate dashboards: number and status of technologies per domain, per strategic goal, business, type, challenge, geography, etc. Retain all information in a Technology Bank, which can be used for manual search and automated correlation and clustering (technology leads, scientific insights, contacts, etc..) Define roles and security access to information and process | Collaboration and connection engine
| | Ability for authorized participants to vote/recommend, comment and ask for expertise on technology being considered Capability to attach URLs, documents and e-mails to each technology Instant stimuli: automatically prompt staff with related technology, insights and people to improve quality of ideas and encourage collaboration Social networking: automatically identify and connect employees who share common areas of interest and similar insights and ideas Communicate and animate your process through personal portal or e-mails alerts: ideas status, progress, request for information or evaluation, etc. Group ideas: assist management in clustering technologies that are correlated to build more innovative concept Key trends: displays the most correlated themes from set of technology to help identify gaps or new areas favorable to innovation | | 3 - IFT's Innovation Search, Mapping & Scouting Services | Partner scouting, patent mapping, state of the art searches, competitive landscape analysis are key input to any open innovation strategy.
However those activities can be time consuming and quite costly if you run them internally. Not saying that you may not have a readily available set of qualified people to run them when needed.
IFT has partnered with a specialized company who has over 300 low-cost but qualified resources to do that for you. This service is already used by Fortune 100 and FTSE 100 companies, several large technology transfer companies in the world, among the largest institutes in Europe and even by the European Patent Office.
Like them, you can gain access at a very competitive price to a team of qualified and experienced domain experts and IP analysts in various technical, scientific and medical disciplines.
| State-of-the-Art searches
A review of all prior art - patents and literature - relating to a particular product, process, ot technology, to identify the current developments along with the major players in the relevant domain.
| Potential Partners Scouting
A detailed identification and prioritization of experts in a given field or technology based on the number of publications and patents. This allows your internal teams to select candidates for potential partnerships in areas where you are looking for qualified input and collaboration.
| Patent Mapping
Scope has extensive expertise in patent mapping and visualization services. As part of our patent mapping service, we provide you with a visual landscape by clustering patent data on specific parameters. We represent such relationships in a three-dimensional space using contour lines, bubble charts and other such graphical presentations.
| Competition Patent Portfolio Analysis
A portfolio analysis involves an in-depth study of the key competitors, their technologies, patent portfolios, patenting trends etc. This will help identifying key technologies, trends in patenting, product pipeline, niche technologies, licensing opportunities, and protection from infringement and litigation liabilities.
| Market Assessment Studies
A market assessment studies will help you gauge market trends as well as gain insight on your go to market strategy. Our market assessment reports cover Industry overview, major companies and their business strategies, SWOT analysis, market opportunities.
| Novelty Search
We provide you with detailed analysis to help determine whether the inventive concept is new over the prior art and therefore contains patentable subject matter. This is intended to provide a general overview of the art for a particular invention, conducted prior to filing a patent application to assess the novelty of an invention.
| | |
