Technology Discovery and the Tech ExplorerSM

One of the keys to successful innovation is to create new platforms and breakthroughs enabled by emerging technology.  It is equally important to extend your existing product lines as current technologies evolve.  Adopting evolving and emerging technologies allow you to better address current and emerging customer needs and provides competitive insulation ensuring advantage over the long term.

We support strategic business managers, R&D, and innovation teams in a systematic technology discovery process that we call the Tech Explorer. 

Leapfrog the competition by harnessing evolving science and technologies

Innovare's Tech Explorer provides a process and a forum for the innovation team plus invited technology experts and lead users to interact and explore current and emerging technologies that can fuel innovation.

We identify potential technologies, explore how they will evolve, and create visions for their applications relative to current and emerging customer needs. 

We map the technologies linking them to current and future customer needs and product attributes with an eye towards customer exciters. We define how the technologies can enable differentiated new products, product lines and new businesses . 

The Tech Explorer is an R&D driven process with support from marketing. The process brings a higher level of connection between R&D activities and customer's needs.  It provides input for technology planning and helps focus concept development to be consistent with the technology possibilities.

The premise behind the Tech Explorer is that advances in science and technology has a two way interaction with customer needs. New technologies can be used to create solutions that address current customer needs. At the same time, advances in science and technology creates a new environment for your customer which creates new customer needs and new opportunities for innovation.

The innovator's challenge is to understand the interaction between technologies and customer needs and anticipate emerging opportunities 

Companies that can anticipate how to link evolving technologies to current and latent customer needs create opportunities with increased competitive insulation.  

During a Tech Explorer project we facilitate the innovation team and provide hands-on content support in a science and technology exploratory.  The goal is to identify, evaluate, and define how to leverage key technologies.  We create technology maps that demonstrate the technology's trajectory, link them to evolving customer needs, and define how they can be used to create advantage.

Typically, our Tech Explorer involves a series of workshops that include a diverse group of people from inside and outside the organization. Outsiders may be key suppliers, technology developers, experts at university or government labs, specialists in related fields, even lead users or researchers whose work is intriguing or may impact or disrupt   your industry. Insiders generally include members of your R&D, engineering, and marketing team members.

We immerse the team into the science and technology focus areas as they are today and how they will develop in the future.   We follow that by brainstorming implications and possibilities for linking technology to the customer needs. The team crafts key insights, ideas and possible scenarios to spark new directions in strategy, technology planning, and concept development. We use the outputs from the Tech Explorer as key insights to focus innovation direction setting.  

The Tech Explorer is a key team discovery activity in our innovation front end process.

View how we apply the Tech Explorer to developing Innovation Strategy for technology driven businesses - Innovation Strategy