The ITONICS Insights uses virtual AI bots that crawl relevant sources for input and process this input accordingly.
- How does scanning, scouting and monitoring differ?
- How to use the ITONICS Insights to scan, scout and monitor as part of environmental scanning
The ITONICS Insights module enables your teams to scan, scout and monitor your corporate environment by searching through and taking advantage of the ITONICS Signals data lake that includes documents such as news, patents, and scientific publications, as well as a knowledge graph of entities such as topics, companies, and people. The scanning, scouting and monitoring processes differ with regard to how and when they are executed. Different features and functionalities are needed to help you optimize these processes.
How do scanning, scouting and monitoring differ?
Scanning the corporate environment loosely for a broader topic such as "Additive Manufacturing" with the goal of identifying unknown areas and niche aspects of a completely undirected awareness of the organizational environment.
Scanning is the process of loosely examining the corporate environment for broader topics. These topics (e.g. Additive Manufacturing) indicate areas of importance which might have been unnoticed by your organization previously.
💡 It will help you answer the following questions:
- What is currently happening that I am not aware of?
- Did I miss something in my previous research?
- Have I considered all perspectives and all influencing factors that might affect my organization?
Scouting is a more time-bounded approach and follows a specific purpose, looking at an identified topic in order to discover further topics, technologies, trends that seem relevant for the organization.
Scouting is usually a (semi) directed and not continuous task with the goal to dig deeper into the topic of interest.
💡 It will help you answer the following questions:
- Are there other players on the market that addressed the topic already?
- How did other players adopt this topic on the market?
- What prototypes and technologies are already out there on the market that address the identified topic?
Monitoring is a very directed and continuous process of looking into and finding new insights about a known topic. The focus of monitoring a known topic is to identify movements, developments and tendencies that indicate a certain need for action depending on the importance of that topic to your organization.
💡 It will help you answer the following questions:
- What are the developments within a given topic, and what are the new insights they indicate?
- What are the influencing factors I should be observing to help me track the developments within this topic?
- What is the outside (objective) perspective on a given topic compared to my own internal (subject) view?own internal (subject) view?
How to use the ITONICS Insights to scan, scout and monitor as part of environmental scanning.
Scanning: In order to use ITONICS Insights for scanning, set up one or more Insights Presets. This will include Signals with a broad spectrum of topics that are nonetheless relevant for your business, e.g. by filtering for sources that you would usually get news from, or by specifying some very broad keywords to describe an area of interest.
Periodically check the Presets for updates, using the Cluster visualization to identify topics and filter the documents, and pinning documents for yourself and your colleagues. Different types of documents may be useful depending on what you are scouting for. When scouting for technologies, you could consult news and scientific publications, while business-focused news and patents may be more useful when investigating industry adoption and scouting for companies and startups.
Scouting: Ensuring that the documents belonging to the Search Fields are narrowed down sufficiently, will help you examine the topic at hand effectively. The topics and company information on the documents themselves will enable you to identify interesting Signals. Once you find something relevant, create an Element to place on your Radar.
Monitoring: You can use ITONICS Insights to monitor an area of interest, by simply adding an Element from the Explorer to the Casual Search, and then iteratively improving the results by adding search terms or refining the query using the Power Search. You can also use the filters to narrow down the scope. Periodical checking on that Search Field to see if any relevant topics have emerged or whether there are any new and interesting Signals.
Checking against the Explorer whether the topic has already been captured will make sure you are identifying novel topics, or topics of particular interest which are gaining traction and interest as evidenced by an increased amount of signals. You can also connect the Search Fields you’ve been creating to Elements in Explorer, so your colleagues can profit from your work, and help in your monitoring efforts using the Signals Feed.
Learn more about how to work with ITONICS Insights: