For ten years, the Open Innovation Team at NTT Data has been promoting innovation activities that lead to collaborative businesses with their clients and startups with “From Toyosu Port”, NTT Data’s open innovation initiative. They would hold business contests, which created lots of opportunities for collaborative businesses with their clients, such as Catch & Go—cashierless store solutions.

While open innovation contests helped scout promising startups and technologies in areas like big data, AI, and 5G, the team faced challenges when developing new collaborative businesses with those discoveries. Since the contests occurred annually, they could scout favorable startups/technologies only once a year, making it challenging to commercialize collaborative business ideas at the right time.

To maximize successful incubations and to better understand specific customer needs, in 2021, the team started conducting in-depth interviews with business units within NTT Data. As a result, they could pinpoint more precise focus areas for open innovation and successfully assist some business units in launching new collaborative ventures.

The shift to understanding customers' latent needs and then proactively creating business opportunities based on their understanding was a strategic change; however, engaging with business units meant that team members needed greater specialized knowledge. For instance, when a Subject Matter Expert (SME) communicates and supports business units providing trusted IT services for clients in the financial industry—such as banking, credit, and insurance—(s)he needs to have a comprehensive understanding of the domain. More specifically, grasping emerging trends like BNPL, digital banking, wellness management, DeFi, and blockchain is very important in guiding business units to new business opportunities.

With just five people responsible for over 100 business departments, the team noticed that their research approach, gathering information from  both offline and desktop sources, was limited. They needed a new solution to rapidly get to know cross-industry trends and pinpoint growth opportunities within each domain.

By leveraging tools and insights from Edge, the Open Innovation Team could enhance its customer-centric business development process.

Using the Edge industry tree, customized research reports, and weekly newsletters has empowered the team to:

1. Gain a better understanding of customer needs and industry trends across a range of sectors, thanks to the quick & systematic mapping of relationships between industries.

2. Pinpoint promising new business opportunities by exploring potential areas and understanding use cases through on-demand research support.

3. Stay up-to-date on the latest developments that impact their focus areas through technology and industry trend reports and newsletters regularly curated by Edge.

The team members are now armed with timely, in-depth market intelligence to strategically develop new businesses and promptly communicate these insights to internal business units.