Struggling to measure innovation?
A combination of leading and lagging indicators can help.
What are innovation data points?
Innovation data points such as technology and business news, VC investments, patent data and scientific articles help innovators analyze market trends, spot risks, identify opportunities and make better business decisions.
But not all data points are created equal, and in order to get a holistic market view, a combination of leading (such as technology news) and lagging (such as patent data) indicators should be used.
Why go beyond patents?
Patent data provides a rich source of information that concretely outlines a company’s innovation and investment strategy. But it does not always highlight real-time decision making. As such, the insights gathered may not provide a complete view of where the market is heading and what innovation-related decisions should be made as a result.
Plus, patents are often written in a way that obscures the product or technology they are tied to in an effort to confuse competitors.
Why not just use leading indicators of innovation?
Leading indicators of innovation such as recently published business or technology news articles might seem like a straightforward way to measure innovation. After all, if it’s trending online it’s going to trend in real life too, right?
Wrong.
Instead, leading indicators taken on their own are difficult to index and standardize. Unlike patents, there isn’t one universal categorization system to classify and group topics or categories of non-patent information.
These factors showcase some of the limiting factors in relying on these data sources separately, and all the more reason why combining these sources of data, or these leading and lagging indicators together can help provide a comprehensive and accurate measurement of innovation
The State of Innovation Related to Digital Health infused with AI
Challenges in combining leading and lagging indicators
The main challenges in combining leading and lagging indicators is that you have to have a common indexing system to be able to overlay both data indicators. However, most platforms aren’t set up to categorize and sort through these indicators in a meaningful way.
Solutions for combining leading and lagging indicators
Here at PatSnap, we have created a Connected Innovation Intelligence solution backed by AI-powered technology that combs through millions of global data points (both leading and lagging) and connects them in a way that makes sense.
Our easy-to-use solution offers users necessary insights such as custom taxonomies and categorizations for all data sources so they can weave together a cohesive narrative.
Global Health Research for the UN
Recently, we partnered with the UN to provide them a 360-degree view of global and regional trends shaping the world. This involved sifting through 30,000 patents and 90,000 non-patent literature documents.
The leading and lagging indicators are captured are being used to information policy decisions and solve worldwide health problems.
This is the power of using a combination of these indicators to innovate — they accelerate innovation, and help make the world a better place.
