Innovation Radar: How Companies Stay Ahead in an Evolving Market

Not every trend deserves your attention. Innovation radars help companies cut through the noise and decide what really matters. In this article, we’ll explore how innovation radars support strategic foresight, with real-world examples and a template to get started.

You’ve seen it: senior managers chasing every trend, anxious group emails asking “Are we on top of this?!” Many organizations fall into the trap, losing touch with the pace of change around them. But the goal is not to react to every societal and market force. It’s discerning which trends and emerging technologies are actually relevant to your business. This is where an innovation radar becomes an essential tool for strategic decision making. 

What is an innovation radar?

At ITONICS, we see it like this: an innovation radar is a tool to visualize the forces impacting your business environment. It might focus on a particular type of force, like a trend radar, technology radar, risk radar, or a startup radar. We use ‘innovation radar’ as an umbrella term that covers this wide range of radars with more specific use cases. As a tool, the radar is flexible, but it’s always used for one purpose: driving innovation.    

An innovation radar brings clarity to complexity. Whether you’re tracking societal trends or emerging technologies, the radar gives you a shared view of what’s changing—and what to pay attention to. It helps you evaluate external signals like shifting consumer needs or breakthrough technologies against criteria that matter to your business. That way, you’re not just collecting information—you’re focusing the attention decision makers in your organization.

How an innovation radar tool supports strategic foresight

Relentless disruption is making CEOs anxious that their company isn’t adapting quickly enough. And for good reason. Markets shift, technologies evolve, and customer expectations change—often faster than organizations are prepared for.

That’s where strategic foresight comes in. It’s a structured way to spot signals of change early, anticipate what’s ahead, and plan today for what might have an impact next year, or even in a decade. Instead of waiting for disruption to hit, strategic foresight helps teams consider possibilities, identify opportunities for innovation, and reduce risk.

An innovation radar brings this process to life. It replaces scattered spreadsheets and static slides, with a unified view of trends, technologies, startups, and more. Teams can collectively evaluate each force according to relevant criteria, debate priorities across departments, then focus their attention on what’s expected to make the biggest impact. 

Real-world innovation radar examples

Organizations across different industries use innovation radars to make sense of fast-moving change. Some use them to track emerging technologies and align R&D activities. Others focus on trends shaping customer behavior or scan for startups and risks that could impact their strategy. What unites them is the need to cut through the noise and focus on what’s strategically relevant.

Elia Group, Belgium’s electricity transmission operator, uses an ITONICS radar to map emerging technologies across six innovation domains. From unmanned vessels to high-altitude pseudo satellites, Elia uses its radar to explore how new technologies can shape the future of energy. 

Alliance SwissPass uses an ITONICS radar to evaluate trends in the mobility industry and connect them to existing and future projects. Over 50 trends, 76 industry projects, and 103 marketing campaigns are tracked by more than 560 users across the Swiss public transport sector. As Tim Loosli, Responsible for Data & Analytics, explains:

“When we first started with the ITONICS Innovation OS, we were primarily interested in the dynamic Trend Radar to support strategic decision-making across our association. After successfully bringing our portfolio of projects and marketing campaigns into the system, I’d say one of the most important benefits of ITONICS is its ability to seamlessly integrate strategic foresight with portfolio management and execution.”

At DZ Bank, one of Germany’s largest financial institutions, their innovation radar has become a central collaboration tool for managers across business units—from asset management to insurance. Built with ITONICS, it includes three core components:

• A visualization of ongoing innovation activities across the group
• 
  A trend radar covering over 220 tailored trends and technologies
• 
  Project timelines to track phases, costs, and responsibilities

Christian Schmitz, Senior Consultant for Innovation and Digitization at DZ Bank, explains that identifying trends is crucial to them:

“We usually do this in workshops with colleagues from all over the DZ Bank group, often including members of other cooperative financial networks in Germany, to get broad insights into the business model that is of interest to our group.”

These workshops ensure the radar reflects the most relevant insights for DZ Bank’s specific context and fosters alignment across a range of stakeholders.

Other companies, like Merz Therapeutics, Lear Innovation Ventures, and Dolby, also rely on innovation radars to stay focused on what matters. Whether it’s identifying emerging therapies, scouting startups in mobility, or tracking technologies that shape the future of audio, the goal is the same: to bring focus and foresight to decision-making.  

Get started with an innovation radar template

If you’re just starting out, an innovation radar template is a great way to explore the concept before investing in software. It gives teams a hands-on, workshop-friendly tool to map out forces impacting the business.

To help you get started, we’ve created a free technology radar template that you can download and print out to use with your team. Use it to collaboratively map existing and emerging technologies that are relevant to your business environment. The template is designed to spark discussion about impact and maturity—what a technology could mean for your organization, and how developed it is in the market. It’s a quick, practical way to identify priorities and inform early-stage decisions before moving to a digital radar.

This paper-based approach provides a format to test the radar logic—what to include, what evaluation criteria to apply, and how to arrange the visualization. Once you’ve mapped your company’s technology landscape on the radar template, capture the results in the accompanying spreadsheet. You can then import this sheet into the ITONICS Innovation OS to see your radar come to life as an interactive visualization.

Take your innovation radar further with ITONICS

Staying ahead in a rapidly evolving market requires more than instinct or speed—it demands a repeatable process. Innovation radars help organizations replace reactive decision-making with a shared, systematic approach to identifying what’s changing and what to do about it.

With the ITONICS Innovation OS, you can deliver innovation-led growth through one unified platform. Our software combines all the tools you need for foresight, ideation, and portfolio management. This end-to-end approach is how leading companies turn complexity into clarity—and uncertainty into a strategic advantage.

If you want to see how ITONICS can upgrade your company’s approach to innovation, just book a demo with our experts.