About the client:
The Client is a multinational interactive Fortune 500 entertainment company that provides entertainment products to a variety of clients globally.
The challenge:
The Client came to PreScouter to help identify specific external technologies that can be strategically applied and developed internally. The Client was looking to identify new and disruptive technologies outside the current expertise of the Client’s internal R&D teams in the areas of:
- Human skin capturing and rendering
- Remote rendering
- Deformable user interfaces
- Automatic commentary generation
- Ultra high-speed wireless solutions for video streaming applications
- Optical processing
Methodology:
To tackle the Clients multifaceted challenges, PreScouter put together a multidisciplinary research team composed of 6 Advanced Degree Researchers from Precouter’s global research network with academic expertise in electrical engineering, hardware design and manufacturing, and material science. Due to the very technical nature of the project, the research team also included two subject matter experts (SMEs) from the global network with relevant competency and a rich history of work in the field.
The PreScouter team used the following approaches to address the Client’s challenge:
- A comprehensive search of companies developing relevant technologies in each of the identified topic areas with the exception of a list of exclusion keywords, provided by the Client. PreScouter also examined company product catalogs to thoroughly evaluate the various offerings.
- A patent search to see if any relevant companies had patented relevant technologies.
- A literature search to see the state-of-the-art in the academic space, and to see if any relevant research with a high technology readiness level was being licensed or developed with a potential commercial supplier.
- Outreach to high potential candidates to interview and obtain further technical details.
- Assessment of potential candidates with PreScouter’s SMEs to obtain an in-depth, expert perspective.
Results:
The goal of this engagement was to investigate and evaluate disruptive technologies in each of the identified topics. Looking through publicly available information at a global level, the PreScouter team selected, presented, and analyzed 10-20 technologies and relevant organizations for each of the 6 areas presented in the challenge section. In total, over 60 technologies and organizations whose products and services most closely matched the Client’s requirements were presented to the Client’s team directly.
In addition, PreScouter conducted an anonymous outreach to a select number of companies for further technical information to address the Client’s questions that came up during the intelligence briefing presentation. PreScouter helped the client survey a list of technologies to be strategically aligned with their internal development.
Impact of PreScouter work:
In addition to answering key technical and strategic questions for the Client, PreScouter’s research and insights provided the Client with a collection of high interest companies for further outreach to fulfill 3 of the 6 challenges at hand. PreScouter also advised that for the remaining 3 challenge areas, there does not seem to be an existing solution that can fulfill all of the Client’s requirements yet, but PreScouter proposed an alternative approach to combine complementary technologies to achieve these goals.
The Client is currently working with the PreScouter team to explore how and which technologies can be combined for use in next generation products and services.
A downloadable version of this case study is available here.
