What Is a Trend Radar And How to Use It

A radar is a tool that uses pre-defined indicators that enable quick and easy understanding and decision-making.

1. Why Is Trend Management Important?

2. How to Create a Trend Radar

3. How to Navigate the ITONICS Trend Radar and Technology Radar

You know the importance of keeping abreast of the latest Trends and Emerging Technologies, and you recognize the crucial role this plays in innovation. But collecting, assessing, evaluating, and having a structured overview can be a challenge. In addition to collecting, analyzing, and making sense of Trends and Emerging Technologies, intelligent insights must also be mapped within their respective organizational environments to be truly useful.

Being able to visualize Trend and Emerging Technology data in a manner that allows specific views, filtering, linking and tagging, and relating different data to each other provides a helpful perspective on opportunity spaces. 

1. Why is Trend Management Important?

Trend management refers to systems, tools, and techniques that collect the correct data, organize it in a structured and helpful manner, enable the straightforward processing of data, and allow for collaboration to gain intelligence.

Organizing and structuring trend data in a manner that allows your organization to garner intelligence is crucial. A lack of proper organization might leave teams confused and unable to take impactful action. For Trend and Emerging Technology data to be helpful, analysis, filtering, and clustering should result in being able to develop scenarios so that organizations are best equipped to prepare for all eventualities. If not, the data remains interesting but ineffective for innovation. Structured, methodical, and continuous trend management is required to support environmental scanning activities.

Moving from intelligence to action requires evaluation processes, discussion, and opportunity space identification. Demand-driven trend evaluation is purposeful in many cases, but if no regular intervals for evaluation are defined, there is a risk that opportunities and threats might be missed. The continuous evaluation of trends can be hindered by ineffective management tools and processes and may lead to unnecessary manual labor demands.

2. How to Create a Trend Radar

A trend radar should be set up with pre-defined categorization criteria that help you visualize thematic segmentation, relationships, ratios, potential value, impact, and/or maturity levels. Defining your criteria should relate to the trends in question, as well as to your individual, organizational variables. These contextual clustering criteria should help translate complex data into easily digestible intelligent insights that enable better decision-making by filtering information from internal and external experts and sources.

Consider both the segments of your trend radar and the distance from the center that allows for a comparative analysis perspective. The ITONICS Trend Radar provides dynamic views that can be configured and reconfigured quickly and easily to give you a variety of views using different evaluation criteria.

Teams across geographies and organizational divisions can easily use digital trend radar tools to view information in ways that pertain specifically to them. Collaborative efforts and the communication of intelligence are practical and useful across organizations through the use of trend radars.

Learn More:

How to use the ITONICS Radar

How to create a Radar Visualization of Industry Trends

How to configure my radar views

What is a Radar view? 

What is a Technology?

How to create a Radar Visualization of Technologies

What is the Technology Readiness Level?

3. How to Navigate the ITONICS Trend Radar and Technology Radar

The ITONICS Showroom consists of 91 pre-analyzed trends and 85 pre-analyzed technologies. The trend radar uses STEEP segmentation to indicate where the most signals for the trend are coming from. Each trend can be viewed according to various metrics, including:

• Potential Impact
• Scope
• Adoption Stage
• Business Relevance
• Need for Action
• Status
• Strategic Fit
• Time to Market Impact

The Emerging Technologies Radar uses industry segmentation to indicate where the most signals for the technology are coming from. Each technology can be viewed according to various metrics, including:

• Technology Readiness Level
• Need for Action
• Internal Know-How
• Technology Attractiveness
• Complexity
• Potential Impact
• Scope
• Status

These criteria can be set using the configuration options found under settings and allow various information clusters to be viewed instantly. 

Selecting an individual Trend or technology from the Radar will provide in-depth information within an element card, including rating options and linked signals. The Trends and technologies in the ITONICS Showroom contain ITONICS Ratings that indicate penetration, scope, and adoption metrics for trends, and for emerging technologies include indications on how widely technologies have been developed, how the developments could influence industries, and the current appetite for the solution the technology provides.

Our team of analysts uses advanced query capabilities of the ITONICS Cloud Insights tool to garner the relevant information alongside our research and statistically derive the Ratings from quantifiable historical and present data. Each Trend is rated on Scope, Potential Impact, Time to Market Impact, and Adoption Stage. The remainder of the ratings provides the opportunity for organizations to rate and evaluate trends measured against tailored organizational variables.

You can view all the connections for a particular trend to other trends that are related through similar or associated tags.  You will also be able to view all the connections for a particular trend to other trends that our team of analysts has provided. This allows you to view all trends on the radar connected through similar themes and relevance filters.