Quantifying What’s Hot in Digital Transformation

One of the most difficult challenges within technology scouting and strategic advice is anticipating trends: When will a particular technology emerge out of labs onto the marketplace in an impactful way? Current approaches, which include tracking start-up founding, investment, acquisitions, patent filings, and monitoring news, are either too slow (that is, they give an actionable signal too late), or they suffer from too much noise. To address this issue, we have developed a new, 100% data-driven methodology which gives a clearer signal about rising innovation, years in advance before conventional methods of monitoring technology. This data-driven approach is based on intellectual property inflection points and early-stage project funding, and in this report we apply it to quantify how “hot” 19 different areas of digital innovation are, ranging from artificial intelligence to health sensors to drones to IoT security.