The Future Of The Ideas Business – The Rise Of Data-Driven Invention

By Julian Nolan, CEO & Founder of Iprova

New ideas are getting harder to find, and with less ideas there is a decline in organisational productivity and economic growth. This isn’t new, nor is the fact that to counterbalance the decline in idea generation, research and development have received and continue to require heavy investment. But with daily news of innovation centres opening up across the globe, the question remains whether initiatives like open innovation, crowdsourcing, or simply putting more scientific brains together will do this investment justice.

Last month, leading representatives of the IP, R&D and technology arenas met in Switzerland to discuss a technology-based alternative to human only idea generation. Hosted by data-driven invention company Iprova, the 2^nd Data-Driven Invention Forum saw attendees from companies, such as Panasonic, Philips and DuPont as well as many other global organisations explore the future of innovation and the role data-driven invention plays in it. Here are some of the conclusions of the conference.

Julian Nolan

To Innovate Means to Overcome the Burden of Knowledge

It was Bill Fischer, professor for Innovation Management at the IMD, who explained the dilemma of today’s scientists and researchers. Their expertise, which is what they were hired for in the first place, can turn into their biggest weakness when it comes to finding new ideas. Burdened by their expert knowledge, their search for the next break-through invention often takes them deeper into a certain field instead of providing them with a wide-angle view to not miss developments and technological advances happening around them. To make it more complex, those advances take place globally on a daily basis and can occur in any field, even seemingly unrelated ones.

In this context it is understandable that ‘sharing the load’ by bringing more scientific minds together seems to be the evident and only solution. However, this in itself creates inefficiencies and complexities, which only create further stumbling blocks on the path to successful innovation.

So, what is the best way to ensure organisations can broaden their invention channels by absorbing, evaluating and implementing new knowledge, upcoming trends and emerging technologies? If investing in more people doesn’t yield the expected results, how do organisations ensure they innovate at the right time and in the right direction?

In the digital era, the answer seems obvious: the future of innovation lies in digitally transforming the invention process itself. Where the analog, human front-end reaches its limitations, machines can help to process, analyse and interpret huge amounts of data in real-time.

Iprova, the conference host, is pioneering the digital transformation of invention. By harvesting the power of machine learning and natural language processing technologies, the company has created a unique, data-driven approach to invention. Its technology scans through myriads of data, to identify market, societal and technological advances that can form the ingredients of break-through inventions. Since these ingredients are by nature derived from distant fields, the resulting inventions have a much greater potential to disrupt than those generated through traditional R&D efforts. With the added benefit of unparalleled speed, businesses using this data-driven approach are able to win the go-to-market race and ‘out-invent’ their competition.

Agile, Customer-Centric Invention – a Kaleidoscope of Possibilities

Various speakers throughout the conference highlighted the fact that the idea’s business is a customer centric one. Understanding customer preferences is key when it comes to creating products and services consumers will be keen to adopt. However, analysing consumer trends before they become apparent is difficult to do. Even more so is predicting what impact those trends could have on the individual.

For example, in today’s society our means to communicate and interact with each other are increasingly digitalised. Our business worlds have turned virtual and so have our personal ones. But whilst we are keen to adopt and reap the benefits of the technologies that allow us to connect, talk, meet, share, buy, the list is endless, – it also makes all those interactions less human. This in itself could trigger consumer demand for another product or service that fills this newly created void.

Add to that industrial and technological changes and customer-centric innovation turns into a kaleidoscope of possibilities. A little turn in either direction and the outcome is a completely different one – a fine line that decides over the success or failure of a new product or service. This is where R&D departments cannot afford to get it wrong and need a dependable invention approach. Dependability is possible when it is not up to humans to ensure that all available data, information and research has been analysed to define what the market demands tomorrow.

So, does the ever-changing landscape we live in make it harder to find new ideas? Yes, definitely. Especially when it comes to ideas resulting in break-through innovation and products and services that will be loved by consumers. However, participants of the Data-Driven Invention Forum agreed that they can no longer rely on ‘finding’ those ideas through serendipity, but that it is time to start to systematically ‘generate’ them instead. And that’s what data-driven invention is here to do.

Image Credits: Iprova