Cutting Through the Covid-19 Fog: Using Advanced Data Gathering to Identify Trends

A common challenge for us—as individuals and business leaders—is to distill clarity and insight from the tremendous amount of information available to us. The current pandemic only adds to the volume, and to the challenge. I see many clients struggling to keep pace with developments—how their markets, customers, and other constituents are reacting to new information, what topics are gaining/ losing momentum, how competitors, suppliers and other partners are faring, and what new opportunities are emerging. In many cases, the information flow on these trends is haphazard, based on anecdotes that happen to be picked up by management. For others, the information is more codified but mining it requires enormous amounts of manual effort—for example, sifting through social media and other channels.

BCG’s Center for Growth & Innovation Analytics has helped many clients illuminate important trends in near real time, providing codified, quantitative insight to complement the more qualitative information picked up via anecdotes, and with a minimum of manual effort. Our analytical platform leverages tools, both proprietary and third-party, that can collect and organize information from a range of sources—media mentions, scientific literature, patent activity, and social media—all based on key words of interest. As a purely illustrative example, the figure below shows the result of mining thousands of stories in the media coverage of COVID-19 to reveal the technologies most frequently mentioned. Not surprisingly drugs, diagnostics, and telemedicine lead the pack, but we also see technologies like wearables and blockchain clustering closely as enablers.

While this example is purely illustrative, the real power of these tools is in the ability to drill down into clusters of interest, for example, to understand the connections between technologies, identify the leading researchers, and discover the most promising companies. More detailed queries can home in on specific questions, for example: How is policy x being discussed by the public? How interested are customers in technology y? Which company of set z is getting the most traction?

If these questions are important to you, feel free to contact me to discuss how BCG might assist you.