Analyzing markets and technologies in view of respective areas of opportunity and competitors is strategically important but proves highly time-consuming for start-ups. That is why many founders conduct this kind of analysis only once when creating the business plan while restricting it to most obvious sources, such as searching a few terms via the web.
The start-up center build! supports start-ups on their way to autonomy and aims to offer its customers services that significantly reduce the effort required for market and technology research and that complements human consulting services.
„The ‘Data Detective’ primarily focuses on helping our founders to continuously strengthen their business model. We developed the start-up-specific monitoring tool together with experts at the research center Know-Center in Graz and provide it to founders sponsored by build! for automated market and technology research and benchmarking, i.e. for competitor monitoring. That way, the ‘Data Detective’ allows to search worldwide for specific topics and potential business partners for their market development. In addition, a smart and viable cockpit enables at a glance what is new in the industry and what has changed. It allows to specifically track what transpires on the market and the competition is focusing on.“
Ing. Mag. Jürgen Kopeinig, MBA, Managing Director at build! Start-up center Carinthia GmbH
Continuously improve business plan
Know-Center has developed a data-driven system for build! that collects, analyzes, and provides strategic market and technology information. Information via open web sources, such as online news, is combined with information from databases, such as that of the European Patent Office, and retrieved automatically.
An NLP (Natural Language Processing) framework designed by Know-Center forms the foundation, which has been extended to a multi-client capable SaaS (Software as a Service) platform. In addition to the NLP backend, the platform includes an innovative, easy-to-use web interface that can be used to visualize information and configure the system in terms of clients, sources, keywords, etc. Continuous maintenance and operation are ensured by Know-Center.
build! consequently provides each client with a dashboard including visually processed and daily updated information. The information helps founders to continuously adapt and validate their business plan while a semi-automated system simultaneously supports and complements human advisor’s consulting services.build!