Technology scouting: soft or hard skills?

The 10 fundamental characteristics of the scout

Nowadays, innovation is a necessity for any company that wants to grow, increase its competitive advantage, or open itself to new business opportunities. To define a strategy related to achieving growth and improvement goals, the company often starts with well-defined and specific needs, and just as often these needs are focused on the incremental development of the products or services the company offers to its customers. A much broader debate could be opened about why companies innovate and how the offering is more technology driven or more customer centric, but in this short article we simply want to make the connection between responding to those purely technological needs, and finding new technologies or solutions.

Technology scouting, for many companies, is often the starting point of an innovation process, and just as often this task is left to engineers, designers, researchers, or innovation managers. Regardless of who is the main actor in this quest, said actor must necessarily possess a set of skills that delineate the typical scout.

This is the reason for the initial question. In fact, technology scouting can be both a soft skill, because it is not learned in books, let alone at university; and a hard skill, because it requires some more purely technical skills that allow the scout to approach different technologies and technological domains, even if he is not an expert (as the British would say a “native”). That being said, we might think of defining two separate lists of skills that a scout must have in order to perform effectively.

The 5 most important soft skills of a scout

Soft skills are those that most typically relate to the person (or professional) and how he or she does a particular job. In the framework we want to outline, a scout should have these 5 characteristics listed below.

#1 – RESOURCEFULNESS
It is a characteristic that every scout must have, that is, they must be able to see beyond the identified technology or solution. In this meaning, it is understood that the scout must have precisely an entrepreneurial mindset, that is, he or she must be able to turn what was found into a business opportunity for the company by identifying its applications, differentiating features, possible risks and actual impact on the business.

#2 – ANALYTICITY
A scout must be able to analyze the identified solution; he must generally create a tool for himself based on the basic criteria that will help him identify the best possible solution. So it must be able to unpack the various specifications, and reduce the problem (or need) to a series of more easily solvable sub-problems. This requires strong analytical and reflective skills, because doing so enables one to clearly visualize pros, cons, benefits and risks.

#3 – ABILITY TO CONNECT
Also known in English as the ability to “connect the dots,” that is, it is the ability to find the actual links of a said solution. For example, if I found a technology for functional surface coating, a scout should immediately ask where it could be applied, on which product it might work well, who within the company might be the best stakeholder to engage to better understand the solution, how marketing would perceive this new application, etc. Connecting the dots also means making the immediate connections with all stakeholders and affected business to maximize impact during implementation and commercialization.

#4 – CREATIVITY
The scout must have a strong component of creativity, because that ability often helps in problem solving and seeing things from different perspectives. This component also allows the scout to approach a technology critically and differently, i.e., to do so-called “cross-cutting” scouting, which assumes that certain solutions can be sought and found in technological domains or industries different from one’s own field.

#5 – ORGANIZATION
Those who do this work must necessarily be organized, otherwise a scout risks missing some pieces that might prove essential or important, even though at first pass they might be of secondary importance. Scouts often work with mindmaps, or specific tools for organizing work and results in a logical way. In our experience, we have worked with tree scouting and a quadrant technique, for example, which were particularly effective in identifying solutions in application areas other than the one in which the client company operated.

This first list highlights the typically “soft” skills of a scout, and as you can see these are those typical characteristics that a scout must have at the level of approach in finding the right solutions for their company. In fact, the above assumes that a scout is a flexible person, capable of making connections, consolidating a network and exploiting it when the opportunity arises. So the scout must have what is known as business acumen, to identify what could have an immediate impact on his or her company’s business.

Infinite Area’s innovation managers, together with selected partners, can provide this support and help companies organize their technology scouting activities. Next week we will continue with the description of the 5 hard skills to give you the full picture on the 10 most important skills of a scout.

In the first part of the article on technology scouting, we highlighted what are the typical soft skills of a scout.

In this second part, on the other hand, it is important to highlight the more typically “hard,” or more technical skills that are more easily learned in specific training settings.

#6 – TECHNICAL-SCIENTIFIC PREPARATION
A scout must also have a basic technical and/or scientific background, otherwise he has little chance of starting a well-honed search, and then making an initial selection of the identified solutions. Generally such preparation should be supportive of business management, although in our experience we have found very experienced scouts with backgrounds in economics and business management (e.g., management engineers).

#7 – KNOWLEDGE OF “READINESS LEVELS”
For several years we have often heard terms such as TRL or IRL, already widely described in the literature, and in the case of TRL invented directly by NASA. They are the Technology Readiness Level and Innovation Readiness Level, respectively, which are used as indices of “readiness” of technology and innovation (= in a company). These are indices that help to understand primarily at what level of maturity a technology or innovation a company wants to bring, or brings, to market. By doing a simple Google search, it is easy to find more and less concise descriptions of them to understand their usefulness and cataloging criteria.

#8 – CONTRACTING
Agreements, contracts, memoranda and the like, which generally govern various forms of collaboration, imply that a scout must also be able to understand and manage these more bureaucratic aspects of scouting. Often companies are looking for technologies or solutions that are covered by patents, or in some way involve intellectual property protection, and this implies that a scout is able to assess this aspect as well during selection. Drawing up a good contract might also be a task for the scout, but we always recommend making a pass from the legal department, or relying on some legal expert, to make sure you have not omitted anything.

#9 – IP PROTECTION
A scout certainly does not have to be an expert on patents or IP (Intellectual Property = Intellectual Property) protection, but he certainly must have some sensitivity to this topic, and know at least the basic aspects of it. Companies often venture into discussions with inventors or owners of technologies without asking whether that technology, or methodology, is actually protected, or to whom the intellectual property belongs. As a rule, companies should always ask themselves how to handle this point, because this becomes a major constraint when contracting the collaboration, or deciding how to leverage the newly identified technology. Again, it is good to trust the scout in the early stages, but always better to consult an IP expert or so-called patent attorney to make sure you don’t make a mistake.

#10 – INVESTMENT PREDICTIONS
This last skill, in our opinion, is important although not actually essential. A scout should be able to make predictions about whether and how much the company should invest in the technology to develop it further, to implement it in a specific product, or to simply use it (either under license or as an outright acquisition, such as a patent). This skill would involve having as accurate a picture as possible for any future discussions, and for outlining the kind of commitment the company would have to make, including from an economic standpoint.

These skills that we have listed in two separate articles are part of a training program that Infinite Area offers to companies to create the skills needed to research new technologies and solutions on their own. Technology scouting, unfortunately, is not something you learn in books, but only through direct experience and coaching including initial shadowing. Infinite Area has these tools and makes them available to all companies that wish to do technology scouting to meet their innovation needs.