5 Top Trend Intelligence Use Cases You Need to Know

In most industries, ranging from construction and energy to manufacturing, new technology trends emerge at an astonishing speed. Not surprisingly, most of these fade out in a few years. However, those that last have a disproportionate impact on the industry. A major company may lose its competitive advantage in the market if it fails to invest early in a technology that becomes mainstream in its industry. For instance, Nokia’s reluctance in switching to the Android ecosystem cost it its market dominance.

Trend intelligence is the process by which corporations identify emerging and latest trends that will impact their competitiveness in the long term. As a crucial component of innovation intelligence, it leverages external and internal data to support decision-making. Beyond emerging technologies and trends, this data covers drivers in the marketplace, such as startups, scaleups, technology companies, as well as governments.

Trend intelligence provides data-driven insights into a range of technology trends that advance your open innovation goals.

5 Trend Intelligence Use Cases

Based on your innovation needs, you can leverage trend intelligence to serve different purposes. Here are 5 top use cases for trend intelligence:

1. Proactive Market Analysis

Previously, companies performed market analysis either before developing a product or after its sales. Today, products get outdated faster than ever before. This is why companies now perform continuous market analysis. Going beyond, tracking the changing sentiments of their customers, companies also survey the technologies being developed by their competitors and emerging companies.

Using routine trend intelligence as a market analysis tool has multiple benefits. For one, it allows companies to benchmark the performance of ongoing projects with the latest industry standards. Secondly, it speeds up the incorporation of new technologies that optimize processes within an organization.

2. Threat Forecasting

In the age of globally distributed innovation, competition emerges from startups around the world. Newer technologies make existing technologies obsolete. Beyond internal data, innovation management teams usually have access to limited data, such as the startups that make the news or are located near them. On the contrary, trend intelligence allows them to monitor technology trends globally.

This enables threat forecasting by providing companies with granular data on startups and technologies that challenge their market share. Trend intelligence also identifies new opportunities, the other side of risk. Through corporate-startup collaborations, companies can rapidly integrate these innovations, limiting threats to their dominance and leveraging synergy toward developing new technologies.

3. Competitor Intelligence

It’s not just the startups that are innovating, but your competitors are advancing new technologies too. Most likely, the technologies they are investing in or building in-house are highly relevant to you too. Trend intelligence provides a snapshot of this activity, including what your competition is up to. Using big data & analytics, trend intelligence solutions provide you with the right picks to maximize return on investment (ROI).

4. Identification of Complementary Technologies

Technologies often have a wider range of use cases than their intended application. Trend intelligence not just identifies emerging technology trends, but evaluates their applicability to your industry for a range of use cases. Generally, this includes technologies that are an upgrade over your existing technologies. But often these are also technologies used in adjacent industries that can be put to use for your process or product goals.

Identifying startups whose technologies complement the existing capabilities of a company allows the latter to inexpensively access these technologies. By casting a wide net, trend intelligence identifies technologies that are still in their nascent stages or would otherwise be missed. This way, it provides you with an early-mover advantage over your competitors.

5. Future-Proof Your Business

Due to the easy availability of large amounts of data in an increasingly connected world, your competitors and emerging startups are constantly innovating. Few missed innovations and the biggest of companies could capitulate under the weight of the competition. Open innovation allows companies to leverage the same public data to improve their resilience.

A crucial factor in long-term survival is betting on the right winners among emerging startups. By providing a data-driven approach to scouting trends, trend intelligence optimizes how companies invest in new technologies.

What Will You Use Trend Intelligence For?

A systemic data-driven approach identifies the trends that are most relevant to your needs. This way, you can be sure to spot emerging trends as they appear. Using Big Data & AI, the StartUs Insights Discovery Platform analyzes data on over 2,5 million startups and scaleups developing emerging technologies worldwide.

Depending on your innovation goals and requirements, we offer a range of deliverables that meet your needs. Some of these include:

• Trend Map: Based on data-driven research, we classify emerging trends and group them into categories so you can see all of them at one glance.
• Trend Report: The Trend Report provides you with quantitative insights into the most impactful trends. Additionally, it presents exemplary startups advancing each trend.
• Startup Database: The Startup Database lets you discover a high number of innovative startups that are advancing the emerging technologies trends in your industry.

Based on your innovation strategy, StartUs Insights allows you to find the right trends and identify how they will impact your business!

To discover how we at StartUs Insights empower you to identify the most relevant trends impacting your industry and stay competitive in a dynamic market, we offer a free consultation. To quickly find and monitor technology trends that align with your innovation goals, get in touch today!