Executive summary

The Quantumrun Foresight Platform (QFP or Platform) features a trend intelligence interface that your organization can use to curate a massive number of trends about a wide range of topics to inform your strategy, scenario, and product development processes.

Challenge to solve

78% of the companies we surveyed failed to effectively incorporate emerging trends into their strategic planning and product development initiatives. As a result, these companies faced increased exposure to risk from outside disruption and lost revenue due to missed market opportunities.  

Solution

The QFP can help your company stay informed of current and emerging trends from various industries, professions, countries, topics, and more. More importantly, the platform can help your team make sense of these trends by curating them into custom Lists, writing custom reports, and converting curated Lists into interactive Projects.

Applying trend scanning in your strategy development workflow

The typical process of trend scanning involves employing an in-house or contracted research team whose responsibility is to research and curate news, reports, and databases for signals that detail or hint at emerging trends about topics relevant to the organization’s operations. Over the past decade, artificial intelligence-powered search engines have assisted these research teams in this signal-collection process.

Once enough signals are collected or at regular calendar intervals, these research teams are tasked to synthesize these signals into reports that summarize trends and attempt to identify macro insights gleaned from combining various trend signals.

The findings of these reports are then shared with relevant stakeholders within the organization and (ideally) influence the development of future market strategies and product development initiatives.

The challenge with this largely manual approach to trend/signal scanning is that it is:

• Time-consuming to source and document signals.
• Expensive, if outside contractors are involved.
• Very often poorly resourced with an insufficient number of researchers who can scan for signals deeply, diversely, and at scale.
• Poorly integrated across organizational teams/departments so that trend reports rarely influence strategic or product decisions.

Thankfully, the QFP’s trend curation interface simplifies and improves this signal scanning process.  

Platform integration with the trend scanning process

Based on the simplified outline above, the QFP can facilitate elements of this signal scanning process in the following ways:

• The QRP’s trend curation interface features thousands of current and emerging trends and insight signals for various industries, professions, countries, topics, and more. Hundreds of new signals are added to the platform each month. More importantly, our advanced filtering system and human curators will enable your team to cost-effectively and time-efficiently distill the platform’s mountain of trend intelligence into organization-specific insights that can:
  • Inspire new organizational goals or objectives.
  • Identify new opportunities or threats to prepare for.
  • Guide your team toward specific research objectives to support your emerging strategy.
  • Build well-rounded and informed scenarios.
• As your team discovers useful signals and insight articles, our “bookmarking” feature lets you collect and organize those trend articles relevant to your business into custom Lists.
• Once your team has curated Lists of trends and insights from our trend curation interface, you can then convert these Lists into collaborative Project interfaces—accessible to all platform users within your organization.
• These interfaces include: the Strategy Planner, the Ideation Engine, and the Scenario Composer. These project interfaces will guide your team to collaborate and prioritize your organization’s curated trends and insights and convert them into interactive visual graphs that your team can use to guide strategic decisions.
• Moreover, at any time, your team can engage with Quantumrun Foresight analysts to order custom research and written reports on any topic or collection of topics discovered on the platform.  

How to use the QFP’s trend scanning interface

• Learn more about how to create a List: click here.
• Learn more about how to bookmark platform content into Lists: click here.
• Learn more about how to order long-form reports: click here.
• Learn more about how to convert a List into a Project: click here.

Learn more

To learn more about the Strategy Planner project interface methodology or start your free trial of the platform, please contact a Quantumrun Foresight representative at Platform@Quantumrun.com.