Trend Scouting

Global trends are creating ever-larger winners and losers. A company benefitting from industry and geographic tailwinds is 4 to 8 times more likely to rise to the top of economic profit performance charts than one facing headwinds.

For trends to impact business decisions they must have demonstrable financial impact and direct influence on the behavior of consumers, governments and businesses. The breadth of this impact must span geographies and industries. Finally, it must be clear how a trend’s impact will manifest itself in an actionable business planning horizon. With these criteria in mind, the Research Studio's adaptive, evergreen scanning analyzes over 1.5 billion trends, allowing companies to identify top IP creators within each trend and review their development over time.

Then, perform highly contextual SWOT analysis with unrivalled specificity, drawing on these trends, competitive intelligence, and whitespace analysis.

State-of-the-art artificial intelligence engines can analyze, in real time, publicly available information spanning billions of web pages, patent filings, news sources, clinical-trials reports, earnings-call transcripts, and more. By finding patterns in these disparate data sources, they can help executives identify emerging trends by, for example, measuring the change in the frequency of a term appearing in the data.

Take the example of a manufacturing company trying to decide which electric-vehicle battery technology to invest in.

This is not a trivial decision—the capital expenditure alone would run into billions of dollars and likely lock the manufacturer into a specific technology for many years. Executives in this company would benefit from knowing how associated trends are evolving and when a specific technology is likely to have a clear advantage. They could gain these insights through near real-time tracking of patent and academic-publication momentum, announcements, and investments across different technologies. They could also track relevant regulatory changes such as zero-emission-vehicle mandates that stimulate demand for electric vehicles or local ownership rules in countries where lithium supply is concentrated.

Some of these real-time tools can also perform “sentiment analysis,” which uses trained algorithms to classify news and social-media content based on the event or topic, the companies involved, and the positive or negative sentiment associated with each company. Quantitative investors seeking short-term market inefficiencies use this type of data to inform their trades. Companies developing strategies can similarly tap such analyses for timely perspectives on customer sentiment or reputational risk.

In a world of increasing uncertainty, companies need to be dynamic in how they set and manage their strategic plans. That requires combining no-regret moves that work in any condition and can be executed immediately with a few bigger, bolder bets that would be executed once the executive team is comfortable a conducive scenario is unfolding. By using advanced analytics to track emerging trends, you can trigger these contingent moves before your competitors do.