What technology scouting services do?
The rapid growth of today's developments in various fields of technology and the growing complexity of products and services, has caused human beings to worry about an uncertain future. Information about these changes, coordination and appropriate responses to their situation is one of the most important concerns of technology owners. Technology scouting can alleviate these concerns and allows technology owners to be able to take the necessary steps to deal with these developments and early recognition of emerging technologies. But there are still confusion about how technology scouting can help technologists. Familiarity with the types of services that can be used as technology scouting can reduce the confusion caused by how to use this type of service.
Technology scouting can be defined as a systematic way of technology forecasting and monitoring the overall situation and accurately evaluating the various aspects of a technology by regular and systematic collection of scientific and technical documentation supported by highly specialized research instrument tools, web resources, patent databases, scientific publications and private interviews with technology owners and recognized experts. Technology scouting services can help a wide range of who are dealing with technology such as start-ups, companies, investors, academics, industrial consultants and etc. to early identification of technologies and technological trends followed by raising the awareness of threats and opportunities due to technological development.
Different types of technology scouting services:
Depending on the different organization’s needs, different types of technology scouting services can be provided that the most important are mentioned below:
State of the Art → State of the art search can be considered as the most generic of technology scouting. When an organization or company decides to enter into a certain field of technology, the results of this type of scouting can help in proving or disproving the advisability of this decision. In fact, the results of this type of technology scouting services, helps to understand that what work has been done prior to decided technology and what problems have existed in this direction and the way they’ve been solved, who are the active players in this field and how long does it take to develop this technology.
Patent Analysis → Patents are one of the main sources for technology scouting and patent analysis are considered as the most important technology scouting services due to their technical, commercial and legal informations and have been used as a powerful tool for the world's largest technology companies for many years. Patent analysis reports focus exclusively on analyzing patents (who holds the patent, date of application, country of application and etc.) of certain technologies to find trends in patent applications and granted patents. In fact, a proper patent analysis can meet many of the needs associated with technology scouting such as market screening, competitive intelligence, competency mapping, ideation and white space. Patent analysis can help to R&D organization to define a subject for their research projects via gathering information about a certain technology and in this way expand the basic knowledge in the field of technology. Additionally, patent analytics can helps patent attorneys to determination of patent validity and advice on sourcing and procurement and also provide a comprehensive, technical portfolio view for technologies and companies in consideration for licensing or acquisition. Patent information is also important for analysis of competitors, for understanding a particular technology area, to assess the competitors' strengths and weaknesses.
Problem Solving → Problem solving is a type of technology scouting service for find existing solutions for an unresolved technology need. When companies have a product or process problem and face a technical challenge but don’t know where to look, technology scouting uses a systematic approach to help them to connect with external sources that have faced that problem before or have a solution for it .Also, this service is used when a company want to develop a new product but lacks the technology needed to complete it, in this way, technology scouting services find a solution from outside core industries not easily accessed directly, such as universities, competitors, research labs and other technology solution providers government laboratories, universities and private sector scientific publications, patent documents, press releases. In fact, Technology scouting services helps manufacturers and inventors to find unexpected solutions for their problem with a broader perspective, additional resources and in this way save time, money and frustration.
Technology Foresight → Technology foresight can be considered as the main element of technology development process that can be presented through technology scouting. Technology foresight through in a structured and constructive way, helps governments, organizations and mutual funds to identify the trends of different technology sectors and thus select the most promising or suitable available technologies in the sector and make decisions for the prepare long-term plans in the field of science and technology. Among the resources used to technology scouting, patent database is an important source for technology foresight because these tools are most useful for analyzing and forecasting future technological trends and can support technology foresight in general.
Quick Search → Quickly Search is a services of technology scouting that help organizations to find and capture information about individual technologies and find a suitable technologies via a collection of technical and scientific documentation. For R&D department searching process for find a suitable technologies often takes up a lot of time and effort. But using this services make this process faster and easier. In fact Quick Search services can help organizations to speed up the process of technology searching while also enabling them to get a better overview of potential technologies.
