So what are the options for small and medium-sized companies whose budget does not leave room for extensive external consulting?

1) In the first step, we work with our client's employees to create a technology list of potentially relevant new technology options for the company. We take a very simple approach and first orient ourselves to the exponential technologies available on the Internet. This list is then worked through along the process chain, depending on the budget available to us. Experience clearly shows that it makes sense to limit ourselves to one or two technologies in the first step. 

2) In the following step we collect application examples for the selected technologies and try to visit companies where we can see this technology in use. This step is about understanding what can be done with the technology in the future. It is not about understanding how exactly the technology works. 

3) Then comes a very creative phase. In a kind of brainstorming session, the team discusses what these technology applications have to do with their own business units, products and customers.

The following guiding questions serve as a compass:

* Can the technologies improve existing products, optimize manufacturing processes, enable new services or business areas?

* Do the technologies address a need that we have already identified or formulated? Has a customer formulated something like this before?

All ideas expressed in the team are collected and documented. Once all selected technologies have been evaluated along these lines, the respective results are compared.

4) After several technologies have been evaluated in this way, a sense of which approach might be promising for our customer already emerges at this stage. Finally, a ranking of the selected technologies is created.

5) Once a particular technology has been identified as a top candidate, perhaps the most difficult step of the internal process follows: evaluation.

On the one hand, it must be clarified in a technically sound manner whether the developed ideas can be implemented in practice and, on the other hand, what investments are required for this. 

And it is precisely at this point that it quickly becomes clear that the internal competencies of our client have reached their limits. However, iManagementBrazil's competence is limited to Operational Technology (OT), so that we can bring about a resilient clarification with the help of our contacts from previous projects and to experts. 

In most cases, the evaluation ends positively and then led directly to the decision to invest in the deployment of the identified technology. The actual process of strategic early identification is thus completed.