Technological scouting
Identify the right technologies to meet your needs and boost your competitiveness
For more than 30 years, our specialized team has been supporting companies in their technological scouting projects, helping them find the best technical solutions and suppliers to meet their needs.
Companies that trust us
Key success factors for technology scouting
As new technologies emerge and transform industries, companies are regularly pushed or tempted to adopt these innovations to stay ahead of the curve and maintain their competitiveness. The best way to answer the needs and desires of these companies is to landscape the technologies available and scout for the best solutions. The success of this type of investigation hinges on a few key success factors:
When scouting for technologies, different strategies can prove fruitful. Whether the strategy is to continuously monitor the landscape of technologies until the perfect solution appears or to perform a single snapshot of this landscape to choose the current best available option, one question remains: what is the best manner to approach the technological providers and to adopt their innovations? Both in terms of contract terms, timing and integration steps, having a clear strategy of adoption and/or partnership is also a key success factor in technological scouting.
When is the ideal time to approach a technological provider? What should the terms and conditions of this partnership/acquisition be? What is the roadmap to integrating this technology?
Precisely defining the scope of the investigation and/or a set of use cases to be covered by the new technology is crucial to establish a list of requirements and specifications, and thus to steer the investigation towards the right technological solution.
What is the exact need to be covered? What are the requirements and scope of the use case(s) to be investigated?
Understanding the conditions attached to the usage of a new technology is one of the most important aspects to explore when scouting for technologies. Indeed, whether this technology is licensed, sold, or shared, whether its resulting products are the intellectual property of the provider or of the client, and similar other factors, will determine the user’s freedom to operate. Independently of how valuable a technology is, these conditions could open the doors to fruitful new opportunities, or on the contrary, hinder the user’s ability to innovate and generate value.
In what conditions can the scouted technology be used for commercial or industrial purposes? How is intellectual property defined and protected when this technology is used?
Similarly to the freedom to operate, other criteria need to be assessed when scouting for technologies. Indeed, these criteria will help to sort and rank the solutions explored, and thus identify the best possible technology. Clearly defining these criteria (e.g. level of maturity, proofs of concept, business model, patents, …), and aligning them with the project’s final expectations and requirements, is necessary to guarantee a successful scouting.
What criteria need to be studied and evaluated in order to rank technologies in relation to each other? What are the acceptable thresholds for each criteria?
Once a first characterization and pre-selection of technologies has been made, a key step to orientate the final choice is to challenge the technologies characterization with current users on aspects such as: their general level of satisfaction, real-life constraints and technical challenges, key team skills and organization, level of investment and operational costs, … This will enable to challenge and fine-tune prior characterization according to end-users’ feedbacks.
What are the feedbacks of players using these technologies daily? How is their feedback different from previous investigation insights with key experts, suppliers and literature analysis?
Once a technology has been selected, successfully integrating it into internal operations and ensuring its adoption by all teams often requires more than just technical implementation. Ensuring that teams receive the right information and training to extract maximum value from the new processes is also vital to maximizing the potential of this transformation project.
Does the new technology require any type of information or training to be provided to internal teams? Can these requirements hinder the technology’s adoption and perennity in the organization?
We help our clients to identify, characterize, prioritize and select technologies, whether to replace an existing technology or to change practices in a particular field.
The diversity of our clients and projects, of our areas of intervention (R&D, industrial operations, production, distribution,…) and of the means we use (in-depth literature and web analysis, targeted interviews, learning expeditions, virtual ad-boards, innovation round tables, open innovation challenges,…) gives us a solid experience in scouting exercises.