The Challenge
The sporting goods company designs and makes its own products, with a focus on new materials and components. As it moved into more technical, higher-performance categories, its innovation team needed to decide which technologies to pursue, how to approach new technical problems, and which outside organizations could help bring ideas to market faster.
Those decisions usually started with people. When a team hit an unfamiliar technical problem, it looked for someone who knew the area: an engineer familiar with the material, a colleague with a supplier contact, another team that had seen something similar. Larger studies went to consultancies or patent firms. That worked project by project but did not scale. Each team had its own goals, tools, and methods, so the same question could be researched twice, and what one team learned was hard for others to find.
The IP team already used a patent search tool for patentability, FTO, and competitor searches. The innovation lead's questions came earlier, when teams were still choosing a technical direction. Patents were part of the evidence they needed, alongside scientific literature, applications in other industries, and potential partners. R&D had no formal tool for bringing that research together.
The Solution
The innovation lead explored Patsnap Eureka as a way to support that earlier research. The evaluation centered on how engineers could investigate unfamiliar technologies, work through specific problems, and identify organizations worth approaching.
Quick Research offered a way to build an initial picture of an unfamiliar field, bringing together its main technical routes, representative patents and papers, maturity, and open challenges. Its coverage of active companies and research institutes also gave the team a starting point for investigating potential partners. This connected the question of which technology to pursue with the question of who was working on it.
For a more specific engineering challenge, the team described the goal and constraints to Hiro and explored possible solutions with references to technical sources. Find Solutions also supported investigation of approaches to a technical problem. Together, these capabilities offered a way to move from a broad field of interest toward technical directions worth discussing with colleagues, specialists, or potential partners.
The Result
Initial use gave the innovation lead a way to move from an unfamiliar technology to a map of technical routes, supporting evidence, and organizations worth investigating. The team could use that starting point to explore specific challenges and discuss possible solutions. A small team was developing a shared research method to make findings easier to find and reuse across groups.
Facing an unfamiliar technology?
Describe the challenge to Hiro in Patsnap Eureka, or run Quick Research for a first map of the field, its main approaches, and the organizations active in it.