Innovare: Our Services: Tech Explorer

Innovare's Tech Explorer provide 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.

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

The premise behind the Tech Explorer is that advances in science and technology have a profound impact on customer attitudes and needs. Further, companies that can anticipate how to link evolving technologies to 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

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