Argentina launches National Network for Technological Surveillance and Competitive Intelligence

By Estudio Chaloupka

The Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation presented the National Network for Technological Surveillance and Competitive Intelligence (VT-IE, for its acronym in Spanish), which aims to increase the strategic use of data and information and promote the exchange of knowledge between public and private organizations.

Technology surveillance and competitive intelligence work together to make strategic decisions through reliable and up-to-date information about science and technology. They allow to design a process for selecting, analyzing and converting such information into knowledge for anticipating changes and taking less risk decisions.

One of the proposals is to incorporate VT-IE studies in the calls of Argentina’s Research and Innovation Agency. “We feel that that the monitoring of the projects that the agency finances can be supported through technological surveillance,” stated Fernando Peirano, the president of the institution.

Therefore, all the agency’s future projects may include a study with information on trends in research and technological developments at a national, regional and international level, as well as a status of the intellectual property rights related to the scope of the projects. The first call to include this possibility will be related to public drug production.

Other goals of the network are:

-Promote the search and generation of demands for VTIE services by companies. VTIE reports can be very useful for a company to obtain information on several areas of interest: technologies, design, trends, competitors and state of the art.

-Conduct trainings on business intelligence, data processing, data science, data mining, big data, artificial intelligence, technical marketing and intellectual property, among others.