Seeking for Technologies for Indian entrepreneurs under start-up exchange program.

Indian Innovators Association will work with technology suppliers. Tech scouting is full of challenges, and there are many hurdles and obstacles which need to be overcome before the scout’s work is successfully completed. Information is one of the world’s most precious commodities. The world of business is primarily, and always has been, a world of information. Companies and businesses are constantly striving to gain as much information about their field, their industry, their partners, their products, and most importantly, their competitors. Especially when closing a deal, be it a licensing agreement, a partnership, merger or acquisition, the party with more information and better access to the information available is usually the victor when two companies go up against each other. Tech scouting teams need a way to have all the information in one place, available at their fingertips whenever they need it.

A tech scout is potentially hindered by the size of his network, which might not be big enough to gather all the relevant information which he needs and up on which he bases his decisions. Once a tech scout has gathered all his information, he will need to be able to sift through all of the information he has, incuding information he is receiving secondhand from people in his network as well as people in his network’s networks. The amount of information will rise exponentially the more people the scout engages in order to discover information. The scout must now organize and arrange all the information in a coherent, sensible manner in order to help him reach his conclusions. Information regarding finances, products, pending and ongoing litigation, predictions, complications, and dozens of other categories, each of which can spell success or failure for any sort of collaborative project between two companies.

Rankings
Once everything has been ordered and set into the right category, the information must once again be sorted, ranked by the importance of any piece of information in relation to all the other pieces of information, each of them important. This second sorting allows the scout to focus on areas that are more crucial to the potential deal. Items that are red-flag issues, time sensitive issues or simply burning issues which the scout’s natural instinct say are important. All of these need to be worked into a hierarchy so that when the scout is asked what he feels about any given deal or company, he has the top issues at hand and can immediately respond to the questions asked.

Information Sharing
All of the above challenges are daunting in and of themselves, but the final challenge, of information sharing, is likely the hardest of them all. Each scout will be working on several companies, but must also keep the rest of the scouting team appraised and informed at all times of what he has found, and what he believes are critical pieces of information. Multiply this need to share by the amount of scouts on the scouting team, and you’ll see that the amount of information going around any given scouting team is astronomical. To be able to share all this information among all team members, so all members know what everyone else is working on, is a challenging task that combines all of the above challenges within it, and then adds its own levels of complexity.

Another aspect is the fact that tech scouters do not work in a vacuum. While the scouter can gather all of the information, research a company, follow up on prospective partners and acquisitions, the decision to proceed usually lies elsewhere. Accounting, Legal, Manpower, IT and other departments will all need to weigh in, and a decision must be reached by the CEO and the VPs, the Board of Directors and other stakeholders. While the tech scout is well versed in gathering the information and what all means, however, the decision makers usually do not have the time (or sometimes the ability) to wade through all the information and reach a conclusion. Therefore, there needs to be some way in which the essence can be presented to the decision makers without all the excessive information which comes along with it.

Tech scouting is similar to any other internal project, and is in essence another project to be managed. Project management systems are crucial to keeping a company running smoothly, and this challenge of tech scouting is just like sending a project for the project manager’s approval before it continues to the next stage.