*Updated July 2022
A structured business vs an innovation business—one might think that these two paradigms are mutually exclusive. However, in practice, Innovation is reliant on Structure. Any company can have breakthrough ideas, but only a structured one can effectively turn those ideas into reality.
According to a Forbes article from 2018, most businesses struggle to manage the innovation process because they lack structure. Rapid restructuring of workflows to meet remote working demands has likely further exacerbated this.
This article aims to look at the relationship between these two paradigms—structure and innovation: How do they fuel each other? Why do businesses struggle when they fail to strike the right balance between the two? And how can our platform help shore up the gaps between being a structured business and an innovative one?
[Related Article - Learn How to Drive Your Innovation Initiatives With Data]
An inconvenient truth
Innovation is arguably one of the most overused buzzwords in the business world. People speak about innovation, debate it, and produce and develop new ideas. Still, they often lack formal frameworks for thinking about and executing innovation opportunities shared and accepted across the company.
The truth is—there are no rules. There’s no playbook or one innovation model that guarantees success. Industry, employee expertise, market position, competitive analysis, and a host of individual factors influence how a company structures its innovation efforts. But if there is no one plug-and-play answer for helping businesses succeed in their innovation effort, what is it that differentiates revolutionary companies from reactionary ones?
Winner and Losers
In many cases, the differentiation comes from a company’s ability to take an idea and effectively implement and scale it—and this is where structured processes come into play.
If an organization has a structured innovation process or systematic approach, there is a greater chance of success.
However, setting up new structured processes or changing existing ones can be challenging, especially if a company is bloated with many departments, each with individual processes. Moreover, these activities can demand a lot of time and resources, which many companies simply can’t afford.
So what can business managers do if they see their businesses falling short of resources to invest in restructuring company-wide workflow processes? Is there a simple tool a company can deploy to act as a structured foundation for their innovation initiatives?
Streamline your innovation structure
One of the most challenging elements of searching for innovation opportunities is getting lost in the sheer amounts of data available out there. Where do you even start? And at the end of the day, even expert knowledge is limited.
Your innovation process and structure should be as streamlined and as reliable as possible to ensure that you squeeze every opportunistic drop out of your innovation and business strategies.
However, it’s through the generation of data-driven insights where the platform shines. In essence, the platform bridges the gap between raw data and intelligent decisions. You may pick whether you want to locate an organization that works with a specific technology, identify a particular company, study a specific industry, or uncover market trends after you register as a customer on the platform.
Let’s say you’re looking for “MedTech devices.” After you type this term in the search box, our natural language processing works on understanding the context of your search.
Following that, you'll be able to choose whatever industries and sub-industries you wish to investigate. Once you've decided what you want to learn more about, the AI-powered search will analyze your request and provide a list of related results.
Features that can support your innovative structure
Regardless of which stage of the innovative journey you’re at, such as studying new and disruptive technologies, market developments, or building creative business models, you can connect with our massive database of over 500,000 companies to find what you need. Now, let’s check out how you can efficiently utilise our platform’s features to structure innovative business solutions and streamline your innovation process.
1. Use quick or structured search to locate opportunities
We created two types of searches within our platform: quick search and structured search. Quick searches are pretty straightforward, you search by typing in a company name, industry, or technology, and then our AI will generate results.
A detailed search allows you to type in specific details of what exactly you’re looking for, then pick from a selection of various industries and sub-industries to generate a list of companies matching your detailed inquiry.
2. Find look-alike companies
One feature of the platform is the “find look-alikes” search. In short, this feature lets you search for a specific company by name, and through that search, the AI will pull out all the similar companies in our database.
3. Create radars to track industry and market developments
Radars will help your innovative structure by creating the categories or “playlists” that let you look and stay on top of different innovative and market focus areas all at once. The potential of this feature is massive, as it is designed to keep you constantly notified as long as you are using the platform.
It works just like a playlist. After you've added your favorite startups, technologies, and/or, industries, you'll receive updates and notifications about their most recent actions. Use the feature to help build an innovative strategy and stay on top of your industry and competitors by constantly being able to spot new trends and disruptions coming your way on multiple fronts.
4. Dive deeper with detailed reports
We recognize that to acquire a better understanding, a complete deep dive is sometimes necessary. We've added support and playbooks to help you get the most out of our innovation platform.
Our in-house analysts analyze and offer customized research on the targets, industries, technologies, or data clusters you need, whether for personal research or your stakeholders’ demands. Our staff and support structure are always ready to help you get started on your innovation journey.
Also, don't underestimate the power of good content; we provide thought leadership articles, ebooks, case studies, and reports to help you hone your innovative business solutions. This is something that other platforms and databases lack, and it's something that we can provide.
Sometimes all you need is a list and some basic company information to get started. At other times, you might desire to be able to understand the entire spectrum. Simply order a report, and our specialized analysts will provide you with qualitative information about those businesses, such as their business model, product/services, technology, and more.
One hub to rule them all
We aim to make our platform an innovation hub, so we try to tackle all the issues that drive the innovation process difficult and provide a streamlined experience. Valuer's data-driven platform offers a complete innovation structure to assist businesses, accelerators, and venture capital firms in identifying new technologies, companies, growth possibilities, and any other innovative business solutions.
We accomplish this by giving you the features that cover everything from a simple search to industry and technology overviews based on reliable data generated from our AI algorithms. You can think of the platform as the bridge that allows you to connect your business strategies with your innovation opportunities and should be used as a tool to help prop up, strategize, and structure your innovation process.
