Sudhir Brahmandam

Technology Landscape Mapping: At the Heart of Open Innovation

OVERVIEW: Open innovation efforts traditionally focus on sourcing external solutions against known needs. This approach, while helping the organization to close gaps in internal capabilities, has only limited impact on ideation and strategy. A broader awareness of technology and market trends can itself become a powerful source of new and differentiating ideas. Because of this, a systematic process for building technology awareness and articulating and disseminating knowledge within the organization is critical for enabling a collaborative cross-functional ideation process. This can be accomplished through systematic, proactive scouting and technology landscape maps, which, for a given technology domain, identify technology drivers, critical technology attributes, related existing and emerging technologies with their commercial readiness levels, and the opportunity space enabled by these technologies. We are sharing a new framework, with associated processes and tools that we developed at Kennametal. This process addresses a broader set of objectives than targeted technology searches and is versatile enough to be applied to any technology domain.

Capitalizing on Emerging Technologies: A Path to Creating Opportunities in New Markets

OVERVIEW: A critical innovation competency is the ability to recognize technologies that can best be exploited by a particular company and to drive investment in them. We have developed a framework for identifying and developing technology-based business opportunities in new areas for a company. The framework brings together many aspects of emerging business opportunity identification and deployment, and is centered on defining a critical set of capabilities needed to address evolving market challenges. Our approach is implemented through a parallel understanding of market and technology trends connected with the dynamics of the relevant value chains. A new external technology that has the potential to augment internal capabilities can be an enabler in the opportunity creation formula.