Emerging Technology Radar

Clustering a graph of emerging technologies showed us where they were converging, and those convergence themes became the pods our whole group was organized around.

The challenge

Our group's technology radar tracked emerging technologies and scored each one on feasibility against business relevance. That's useful as a list, but a list can't answer the questions that matter for strategy: what is this technology connected to, who is building it, and what does it converge with?

What I built

ETRx turned the radar into a graph. Each discovered technology became a starting point, linked to the companies working on it, mergers and acquisitions, news, our vendors, our own demos and use cases, and our clients. I made the graph queryable across the group, so other projects could build it in directly.

How it came together

Keeping it fresh took a mix of approaches: internal curation, automated pipelines and, eventually, language models. The clustering was the turning point. It showed where separate technologies were coming together, and those clusters became our convergence themes.

What happened

ETRx informed our group's strategy and direction. We used it when pitching work and in thought leadership online, and several internal products built tight integrations with it, used by hundreds of people. It became one of the group's defining technologies.

What I'd take forward

The same approach works for any studio's archive: an agent breaks each past project into a small graph of its technologies, vendors and people, and connects it to the wider map of emerging technology. In a concepting session, you'd see which companies, people and technologies are worth considering for the idea on the table.