Scout (Track New Technologies)

Scout gives your scouting team one place to find emerging technology companies, research them with AI, and track each one from first look to partnership.

In this article

• Quick start
• Who Scout is for
• What Scout is best for
• How Scout works
• Key terms
• Set up a Scout initiative
• Find and research companies with Scout AI
• After you import companies
• See the big picture with Our Landscape
• Pipeline, stages and statuses
• FAQ and troubleshooting

Quick start

1. Set up a Scout initiative with the setup wizard.
2. Run a Scout AI search to find companies that match your need.
3. Review the results and import the companies worth a closer look.
4. Evaluate the companies in the pipeline and track them on Our Landscape.

Who Scout is for

Scout is built for the team whose job is to find outside companies worth working with: an open innovation group, a venture or partnerships team, or an R&D group watching for new technology. In Scout, each entry is a company rather than an idea, and it is described by the answers on your submission form.

Scout is not a crowdsourcing tool. Instead of collecting company suggestions from employees, the scouting team brings companies in with Scout AI, then vets each one through a structured process. Employees take part by following companies, adding comments and joining first meetings when a company is relevant to their work. The public site becomes a showcase of what the team is scouting and who it has partnered with.

What Scout is best for

Scout works best when your team starts with a clear question and needs a reliable list of companies that could answer it. A few common starting points:

• Solving a specific business problem. A business unit needs a better way to inspect parts, cut packaging waste, or automate a manual process. The scouting team searches for companies with a matching technology, then brings the strongest ones to a first meeting with that business unit.
• Mapping an emerging technology area. Leadership wants to know who is working on solid-state batteries or computer vision for quality control. Scout AI builds the initial list, and Our Landscape shows the field at a glance.
• Finding alternatives to a current technology or supplier. When a contract is up for renewal or a vendor falls short, the team can look for competitors and newer entrants, compare them on the same questions, and move the best options into a proof of concept.
• Showing the business what the team is doing. Browse Companies and Our Landscape give stakeholders a live view of every company in play and every partnership that has come out of the program.

When to use something else: Scout is designed around a scouting team sourcing companies, not around open submissions from employees or outside applicants. If your program needs a different intake, such as grant applications or an employee suggestion box, talk to your Brightidea team about other apps or a custom configuration.

How Scout works

Most scouting programs follow the same arc, and Scout's pipeline is set up to match it.

Key terms

• Initiative: one Scout program, with its own site, form and pipeline.
• Company: one entry in Scout, like an idea in other Brightidea apps.
• Submission form: the questions that describe each company, such as Company Website and Technology Summary.
• Pipeline: the path every company follows, made up of stages and steps.
• Stage: a major phase of the process, such as Evaluation.
• Step: a specific task inside a stage, such as Screen Companies.
• Action item: a task assigned to a person for one company, such as confirming it meets your prerequisites.
• Rule: an automation that moves companies or takes an action when a condition is met.
• Single scale evaluation: a review where evaluators rate each company on one scale.
• Quick Add: the pipeline menu for adding companies, including with Scout AI.

Set up a Scout initiative

The setup wizard creates a complete Scout site in a few minutes, with the pages, form and pipeline already in place.

1. From your apps screen, open the Scout app.
2. Select Set Up a Scout Process.
3. Complete the setup wizard: enter a title, a description and your audience.
4. Review your new site. Scout creates the home page, a Browse Companies page, an Our Landscape page, an FAQs page, the submission form and a preconfigured pipeline.
5. Update the site to fit your program. For example, change the hero image, edit the home page text, adjust the submission form, or replace the default categories with the technology areas your team covers.

A new Scout site after setup.

Categories matter more than they might seem. They organize Browse Companies and form the slices of Our Landscape, so set them up before you run your first search. [Confirm path: where admins edit categories.]

Find and research companies with Scout AI

Once your initiative is set up, Scout AI is how companies get into it. Describe a technology, trend or business need, and Scout AI searches the web for matching companies, researches each one against your submission form, and gives you complete profiles to review. Research that used to take hours of searching and copying now takes a few minutes, and every profile comes with the sources behind it.

Before you begin

• Only initiative admins and moderators can run Scout AI and import companies.
• [Placeholder: whether Scout AI is included in all plans or uses AI credits.]
• [Placeholder: how many companies one search returns.]
• [Placeholder: what data is sent to the AI model and whether it is used for training. Link to the AI in Brightidea article.]

What happens when you run a search

Behind each search, Scout AI works through four stages.

1. It reads your submission form. Every question, with its help text and answer options, becomes part of the research brief. If you add or change a question, the next search uses it automatically.
2. It finds candidate companies. Scout AI searches the web in several passes. It looks past the obvious names to include direct specialists, companies with adjacent products, smaller and open-source vendors, larger platforms that include the capability, and established products that still compete. Duplicates are merged, so "Acme Robotics, Inc." and "Acme Robotics" count as one company.
3. It researches each company. Scout AI researches every candidate separately, using live web search to answer each question on your form, and keeps track of the pages it used.
4. It checks the results. Before anything reaches you, Scout AI checks each company's answers against your form. If a company can't be researched well enough to answer your required questions, Scout AI leaves it out and, when it can, replaces it with another company from its list.

Built for accuracy

A scouting decision is only as good as the research behind it, so Scout AI is designed to be honest about what it knows.

• Blank is better than wrong. When Scout AI can't verify a fact, it leaves the answer blank or chooses an option such as Unknown instead of guessing.
• Sources for every company. The web pages Scout AI consulted are listed in the Research Sources question, so evaluators can check the work.
• Research you can audit. Research Confidence and Last Verified Date show how solid each profile is and when it was checked.
• You stay in control. Nothing is imported until you review the results and choose which companies to add. Imported companies are marked as AI-generated content.

Run a search

1. Go to Admin Tools > Manage Pipeline.
2. Open Quick Add and choose Generate with AI.
3. Under What type of companies are you looking for? enter a trend or the type of company you want.
4. Start the search. A progress message shows while Scout AI works, which can take a few minutes.
5. Review the results, remove any companies you don't want, then import the rest.

Starting a Scout AI search from Quick Add.

Reviewing Scout AI results before import.

Try searches like:

• "3D printing for aerospace parts"
• "Computer vision startups for manufacturing quality inspection"
• "Alternatives to Acme Robotics for warehouse picking"

Scout AI only knows what you tell it, so be specific. Name the industry, the problem, and any company or technology you want to compare against.

Tip: Scout AI uses each question's help text to decide what to look for. Write help text the way you would brief a researcher, for example "Only publicly verified examples."

What Scout AI can't do

• Fill in attachments. If your form has a required Attachments field, turn off Required for that field before you use Scout AI.
• Find private information. Scout AI uses public web sources. It usually finds a company's general contact channel, but not unpublished details such as private funding figures or a named person's phone number.
• Research every company it finds. If some companies can't be fully researched, you'll see: "Some companies were left out because the research could not complete them."

After you import companies

Imported companies start in the Screen Companies step of the Evaluation stage, and they appear right away on Browse Companies and Our Landscape. From here, the work moves to your evaluators.

1. Assign evaluators. Make sure the Screen Companies step has evaluators assigned so each company gets reviewed. Evaluators are notified by email when they have companies to review.
2. Review the research. Evaluators read each profile, check the Research Sources, and score the company against your criteria.
3. Move the strongest companies forward. When every action item in Screen Companies is complete, a rule moves the company to Conduct First Meeting automatically.

See the big picture with Our Landscape

Our Landscape shows every company in your Scout initiative on one circular chart. It answers the questions stakeholders ask most: which technology areas has the team covered, where does each company stand, and where is the program putting its effort? It's a useful view for a leadership update or a quarterly review, and it uses live data that refreshes each time the page loads.

Our Landscape, with companies grouped by category.

Read the chart

Each dot is a company. Where it sits and how it looks come from its answers on the submission form.

• Sectors (the slices): By default, each slice is a category.
• Rings: Group companies by one form question, from the center to the outer edge. By default, Scout uses Contact Status, so companies you're already talking to sit apart from ones you haven't reached yet.
• Dot size: By default, larger dots mean more verified funding. Companies with no value get a standard size.
• Dot color: By default, color shows the company's status. Gray means no value.

Explore the chart

You can change what the chart shows to answer a different question. For example, set Rings to Research Confidence to see which companies need more research, or filter to one category before a meeting with that business unit.

1. Open Our Landscape from the site navigation.
2. Use the Filter · Category dropdown to show one category, or keep All categories.
3. Use the Sectors, Rings, Dot size and Dot color dropdowns to chart the companies by other form questions.
4. Hover over a dot to see the company's name, category and values. Click a dot to open the company's page.
5. Click a color in the legend to highlight those companies. Click it again to clear the highlight.

The footer shows how many companies are plotted. A company is not plotted when it has no value for the Sectors or Rings field.

The chart controls and legend.

Add Our Landscape to navigation

Our Landscape is in the site navigation by default. If it was removed, go to Site Setup > Site > Navigation, add a navigation item, and choose [Landscape] in the Link dropdown to add it back.

Choosing [Landscape] in the navigation settings.

Pipeline, stages and statuses

The pipeline carries each company from screening to results. Scout comes with four stages and six steps. To view or change them, go to Admin Tools > Steps.

1. Evaluation
   1. Screen Companies: Evaluators complete a single scale evaluation against your criteria.
   2. Conduct First Meeting: An action item confirms each company meets your prerequisites. A rule moves a company here automatically once all action items in Screen Companies are complete.
2. Active Engagement
   1. Conduct Follow-up Meetings: The team discusses opportunities and risks and agrees on which companies to pursue.
   2. Request Proof of Concept: The team designs and reviews an implementation plan, then starts it.
3. Integration
   1. Monitor Integration into Business: The team records the implementation and confirms it went smoothly.
4. Complete
   1. Record Results: The team tracks projected and actual business impact.

The Scout pipeline with its four stages.

The Scout process diagram.

Statuses say what your team has decided about a company, while stages say how far along the work is. A company can stay Active for a long time and still move through several stages.

What employees see

The site is where the rest of the business follows your team's work. A Scout site has four pages. Scout sites have no Submit Company button, because companies come from the scouting team.

The Scout site navigation.

FAQ and troubleshooting

Why didn't a company show up on Our Landscape? It has no answer for the field used for Sectors or Rings. Fill in that question on the company, or pick a different field in the dropdown.

Our Landscape says it can't tell which initiative the page belongs to. The chart must sit on a page inside the Scout initiative. Check that the navigation item uses the [Landscape] link.

Scout AI is taking a long time. This is expected. Scout AI searches and researches each company, which can take several minutes for a large request.

Scout AI gives an error about attachments. Your form has a required Attachments field. Turn off Required for that field, then run Scout AI again.

Related articles

• AI in Brightidea
• Scout launch playbook