Product Innovation

Often in business, the biggest breakthroughs come when organizations connect different, and seemingly disparate, ideas and approaches.

Diversity of perspective has been shown time and again to foster fresh thinking to solve tough problems. Such is the promise for organizations that can effectively bring together data and design.

To speed innovation and fend off disruption, R&D organizations at incumbent companies can borrow the tools and techniques that digital natives use to get ahead.

These departments are being asked not only to push out innovative products and services—which is key to ramping up organic growth—but also to support the formation of digital business models that compete in new markets. Yet many R&D teams, particularly at companies that make industrial products, find themselves hampered by longstanding aspects of their approach, such as rigidly sequenced processes, strict divisions of responsibility among functions like engineering and marketing, or a narrow focus on internal innovation.

Some product-development teams have begun to overhaul the way they work as part of wider digital transformations at their companies. Those transformations can take a long time, though, as companies modernize their IT architectures, adopt new technologies, reorganize people, and learn agile ways of working. Since digital rivals aren’t waiting, product developers at incumbent companies need innovation accelerators that they can put to use almost immediately.

The Research Studio's component discovery helps organizations mine clinician-level evidence to repurpose and reposition assets. The platform auto-analyzes functional similarities and alternatives to existing assets, based on useful qualities of the asset’s properties.

A range of analysis techniques are applied, including:

Prior art blindspots
Opportunities are identified by seeking out unexplored existing applications (applications unknown to the client, while being known to research and inventors community).

Property-based Analysis
Potential applications are revealed based on useful qualities of asset’s properties. This helps companies exploit whitespace potential via novel applications for core assets.

Substitute Analysis
This informs repurposing ideas by analyzing functional similarities and alternatives to existing assets.

Trend Monitoring
Ongoing analysis of millions of emerging trends and enabling technologies help discover new markets, and overturn declining volumes or niche stagnation. It also detects and resolves unmet consumer needs (longstanding or emerging).

By connecting previously unconnected dots and entirely different domains of knowledge, Research Studio identifies indirect drivers, effects, and related issues – and discovers whitespace opportunities at unprecedented depth and pace.

R&D departments can innovate with confidence, using high-throughput, evergreen, AI-assisted research to discover new markets and applications for existing products, or expand along the value chain.