Global Strategic Technologies Analysis – Why Getting It Going Now is a Great Idea

Various studies show that technologies companies that actively scan the global landscape for competitive technical intelligence generate significantly higher growth rates and profitability than those that don’t.

In fact, the 2006 IBM Global CEO Survey on Technology Innovation reported that companies with effective programs of global scanning grow their revenues 33% more per year than other companies.

The book “The Medici Effect” reports that, in the markets they studied, the 14% of companies who were most aware of their global competitive landscape booked 61% of the profits.

These ROI statistics have put the mining of the Global Ideas landscape on 65% of Technology Company CEO’s strategic radar, according to the IBM Survey. These CEOs say they intend to charter their organizations to scan global IP in 2007 and 2008 - on a “geography defying scale.”

Implementing such massive global data scanning from a cold start implies significant learning curve costs.

How far behind are companies that are trying to play catch up in the competitive intelligence game?

Maybe not as far behind as one might imagine, because even the long time players are finding a need to dramatically reinvent their strategy practices due to the explosion of world-wide intellectual property. They are encountering re-engineering and learning costs too.

A key caution to newbies is don’t try to copy the prevailing practices – instead, leapfrog ahead to where the leaders are going.

Five years ago 5,000 relevant patents represented an effective sample size, now 50,000 to 70,000 patents are considered within bounds for effective scoping of an area, especially when looking to find cross-over technologies from other industries for breakthrough ideas.

Addressing the 10-fold increase in finding “perhaps-relevant data” with existing tools and practices is very problematic. Severe methodology constraints exist in these linear approaches, such as bottom-up workup of technology-topic-clusters mined from patents.

Working harder, with hundreds or thousands more added staff hours, is the necessary solution within the framework of most prevailing approaches (or else, more simply solved - carve lots of patents out of the study – and miss what?)

Organizations who have mastered this art of Strategic Technologies Analysis with existing tools have recently determined that continuing the linear approach is not practical in terms of budget or time. Consequently, the most competitive leading edge intellectual property strategy analysts are looking to move beyond their existing tools and techniques.

Henry Chesbrough, in “Open Business Models”, has suggested some aspects of how the practice of strategic IP analysis should be reinvented; in particular, to visualize each patent in the specific role played by that patent in a viable business model.

This “IP in a business context” approach enables multiple payoffs, including: massive scanning coupled with faster illumination and confident down-selecting of relevant IP. Major corporations who have moved to tools and techniques that project IP into a strategy-specific business model have found decision-making becomes more collaborative, therefore it yields more viable ideas and better decisions faster.

Greg Narog, SR VP MKTG Oval Ideas, Inc.

Oval Ideas is a provider of software tools and methods to technologies products based companies, helping them visualize and validate global technology innovation and product strategies in a market context. http://www.ovalideas.com/rdtechstrategy.html

…Knowing beats guessing.