What is it?
Using the ITONICS Radar for your foresight activities provides you with the best graphical representation to map your corporate landscape, understand the relevance of trends, technologies, and companies, and explore fields of action evidently.
It enables you to build up an overview of how different trends, technologies, or startups can impact your company's strategy. To get a first impression of the ITONICS Radar check out the video below.
Please note: This feature needs to be activated by ITONICS. Please contact your Customer Success Manager for further assistance.
Every company faces the challenge of keeping up with technological changes, emerging competitors, and trends. With its intuitive and compact visualization, the ITONICS Radar allows you to store, combine and evaluate the various findings from all your environmental scanning activities on a central platform. This functionality will help you to rapidly process relevant technologies, trends, competitors as well as opportunities and risks. It will provide you with the following benefits:
- One-click radar adjustments: The ITONICS Radar offers a dynamic legend and various filter options that allow you to change the radar layout within seconds and as you (or any user) need it. It allows you to intuitively handle large amounts of data by using filters and zoom functions.
- Unite breadth and deep dives: While the radar helps you to analyze your business environment holistically, it only takes one click to dive deeper into any content element displayed on the radar. No need to search for the right document or further descriptions, it happens in real-time.
- Collaborative sense-making: Use the ITONICS Radar in combination with the rating functionality and invite your colleagues and experts to express their opinion. Come up with your company's common point of view and make decisions on any emerging technology, trend, or response to competitive action evidently.
In the following article, you will learn about
How does it work?
Activating the radar visualization
While your users will later have the option to customize the radar to their needs, you need to provide them with a default configuration. Radars can be built on top of each entity. This also means that content displayed on the radar will be always of the same entity type.
So, choose wisely (your entities) whether you want to build one trend radar, one technology radar, and one company radar or whether you want to display everything within one radar (and under one entity. If so, you can use attributes or segments to differentiate between trends, technologies, and companies).
To activate the radar module, go to the Settings Wheel > Entity Configuration > Entity Configuration and open the respective entity by clicking the Edit (pen) icon. Look for the Radar card under the Modules/Features section and check the box on the left corner of the module card.
When the checkbox is marked, the card will change the layout color from light grey to the system color. Do not forget to press the Save button at the bottom of the page.
Please note that the ability to activate the radar depends on your license.
After enabling the module, you can configure the default view according to your preferences. To access the Radar Configuration tab, click on the Radar icon on the Entity Configuration interface.
From the Radar Configuration you can make changes to configure your Radar view:
- Define the Radar Label - the title that is shown on the top left side of the Radar. It can be anything you want to name your Radar, and you can use 256 characters maximum. (1)
- Define a Segment type for the Radar. Segments are categorization fields for a specific element type, and they are represented by the Radar. A segment can also have sub-segments. (2)
- If you want to set default values for the Shape, Distance, Color, and Size, you can use your configured rating criteria or indicate any dropdown field as rating criteria. They will be displayed on the Radar legend as a default, yet can be adjusted by any user flexibly and according to their needs. (3)
- You can also configure the Radar view by setting preferred actions active by default. Simply check the boxes to activate an action. (4)
Make sure to check the view permissions for the radar setup within the entity-specific permission scheme.
You can access your new radar from the main navigation menu by hovering over the radar section.
Adding and editing the segments of your radar
Segments split your radar into different pieces. This allows you to see easier any allocation of content. A segment can have multiple sub-segments which allows you to dive deeper into any segment of interest. Technically speaking, segments are thus hierarchical fields and need to be configured differently than other attributes.
Segments are always displayed on the Radar visualization by default. You need to have at least one segment for content being displayed on a radar. Clicking any segment title itself will expand the segment and show all sub-segments. You can then go back to the segments view by clicking the Segment title again (1) or with the help of the Clear all Filters button (2).
To create or edit the segments go to the Settings Wheel > Entity Configuration > Entity Configuration > Segment Fields. From here, you will find a list of all created hierarchies or you have the option to create a new hierarchy.
When adding a new hierarchy, you will be asked to provide the name of the hierarchy and indicate how many levels the hierarchy should have. You can create a hierarchy of up to five levels. You will be also asked to indicate to which entity you want to apply the hierarchy. This is a multi-select option if you want to use the same hierarchy across different entities.
Once created, the hierarchy will be added to the field configuration of the entity indicated, the create/edit form and view configuration (if you do not set it as a pearl chain). From there, you can define the position of the hierarchy in the create/edit form and view form.
As a next step, you need to provide the values for the different hierarchical levels you have created.
To do so, navigate to the Settings Wheel > Entity Configuration > Segment. The list under 'segment' will show you the hierarchical levels that you have created. Click on one level and a new page will open where you can add the values.
You can perform the following actions on your segments or sub-segments:
- Add segment to enter a new value to your hierarchical level
- Edit or delete each of them separately by clicking the pen or trash icon on the very right side of the element.
- Delete a few elements at the same time by selecting the checkboxes on the left side of the elements and clicking Update next to the Delete selected elements drop-down menu.
- Define the order in which the segments are displayed by dragging them via the cross icon on the very left side of the element.
To add a new Segment click the Add button on the Manage Segment interface. When you fill the form, click Save to continue.
To add a new Sub-segment, navigate to the Settings Wheel > Entity Configuration > Segment. Find the according lower hierarchical level in the list, and click on it. From here, you can also add or edit any sub-segment. Fill out the form and pay attention to selecting the right higher-level hierarchy, i.e., a segment from the segment dropdown options. Once done, click Save.
If you are unsure about what is the best segmentation approach for your use case, check out this article on How to best segment and split your foresight work.