HOW TO: TREND- AND IDEA MANAGEMENT

The major challenge of remaining innovative and adapting to constantly changing market requirements presents industrial SMEs, family businesses and banks in particular with a continuous transformation process. Systematic trend and idea management can provide support here. By identifying future trends and collecting innovative ideas, medium-sized companies can increase their competitiveness and open up new business opportunities to not only pursue innovations, but to manage them.


The goal of trend and idea management is to identify future trends at an early stage and develop new business ideas and opportunities from them. In particular, understanding customer needs enables new requirements to be created and localized before they are even demanded by the customer. Various methods and processes can be used to generate the broadest possible spectrum of ideas and select the best ones from these.

How does trend and idea management work in medium-sized companies?

Systematic trend and idea management begins with the identification of cross-industry future trends. This can be done, for example, by conducting industry and market research, as well as expert surveys. Another option is to use trend scouting tools that automatically collect and analyze relevant information. It is also essential to regularly collect feedback from customers and employees and take their suggestions and proposals into account.

After collecting ideas, it is important to evaluate and prioritize them to select the best business opportunities. A prioritization matrix can be helpful here, in which each idea is evaluated based on criteria such as market potential, technical feasibility and cost. 

A large part of trend and idea management can also be digitized - for this we can recommend the following tools from our cases:

Trendmanagement: QMarkets, ITONICS

Project- and idea management: Innolytics, Braineet

In complex organizational structures, it can make sense to set up a monitoring and decision-making structure to ensure that responsibilities and decision-making powers are clearly distributed. The role of the various departments and business units in the innovation process should also be taken into account here.

Cross-industry future trends that should be taken into account in trend and idea management include, for example, digitalization, sustainability, the aging of society, and advancing technologization. However, it is also important to consider local market trends and developments in order to respond to the specific needs and challenges of one's own company. Innovation topics should always be derived from the company's overall strategy.

In summary, trend and idea management is an important component of successful entrepreneurial activity. A systematic and structured approach can help to open up new business opportunities and to survive in competition. It is important that responsibility for trend and idea management is clearly defined and regularly reviewed in order to achieve continuous improvement.