Mapping the technological landscape to accelerate innovation

The quality of an innovative idea and the likelihood that it will lead to a successful new product or service is directly related to the quality of the information that is used to generate the idea and assess its value. Ideas based on a poor understanding of the underlying need or technologies that might be used to address that need will rarely succeed. An assessment of market attractiveness based on faulty estimates of customer readiness for your innovation and current or potential competitors' activities and their likely response to your offering is a high-risk effort. To successfully innovate, organizations need to have the best information possible to support their development efforts and up-to-date information on the eternal factors affecting an innovative project's success so they can decide whether it is worth continuing. Competitive Technical Intelligence (CTI) is a branch of Competitive Intelligence (CI) that provides those developing new technologies, products, and services the information required to make better project selection decisions by ensuring the organization has the best information possible on customer needs, technology options (including using external collaborations to speed development and manage risk), and the competitive environment. CTI continues to provide value throughout the development process by alerting project managers to changes that might affect the attractiveness of a project under development. While CTI shares many tools and approaches with other forms of CI, it has special characteristics that call for a different way of managing the intelligence collection and analysis. Specifically, it is common to supplement the CTI staff's capabilities in ways not often found in other types of CI by leveraging the interest, knowledge, and skills of their users, the technical staff. Drawing on over half a century of research on technology forecasting and innovation, and several decades of the author's working with organizations to establish CTI programs, this article outlines where and how CTI can help organizations enhance their innovative efforts.