At a time, when humanity is being exposed to newer technology every single day (that sounded damn philosophical, didn’t it!), ‘Innovation’ has emerged to become a need that has both businesses and consumers alike reach for their wallets.
Businesses across the world are realizing that any technical innovation can no longer be confined within organizational silos and to a group of researchers or scientists working in a lab. Over the next 15-20 years, breakthroughs in development across the globe is predicted to be driven, either by innovation in technology or those that enable more people and organizations gain access to that technology.
It would continue to work simply because the system allows all stakeholders in the process pool their strengths, practices and budgets to develop new technology solutions.
says Anup Sahoo, the man behind this unique innovation marketplace of sorts, aptyl christened, ‘Ideapoke’
The Platform
Back in 2010, Anup Sahoo and Sanjay Sahoo, childhood friends working together on Innovation Management Software at 3M, quit their well-paying MNC jobs to startup. They together dreamt of establishing the ‘Google for Technology information’ and the World’s largest innovation network!
That is how Ideapoke came into existence. This start-up is establishing the World’s Largest Technology Innovation Network.
Innovators register with Ideapoke creating a profile to showcase their technology. With that in place, they are now capable of uploading their more relevant and intricate information on the platform, related to the technology they are showcasing. And solution seekers can search for technologies on the same platform, allowing them to connect with the technology owner directly.
We were the first Indian company to provide technology scouting and Innovation As A Service.
says Anup, the founder.
The seekers collaborate with the technology partner once they reach an embargo to buy / license / co-develop technology.
adds Sanjay, the co-founder and VP operations.
Ideapoke has developed a search framework which encompasses their in-house developed search technology (Discovery Engine) accompanied with a customer feedback mechanism in the overall technology search process. The search framework also crawls through the web and mines data from university blogs, scientific papers, USPTOs (United States Patent and Trademark Office), Europe PTOs and similar sources.
The Process
Ideapoke initially gets the raw requirements of innovation or technology scouting areas from customers along with a problem background. This is followed by a scoping exercise where they articulate the Innovation requirement of their customer.
Post appropriate problem articulation, Ideapoke will define and enlist a broad set of key words. The key words in addition to various customer-provided filters – such as constraints on Partner geography, stage of product cycle etc. will be fed as inputs into Ideapoke’s Discovery Engine.
Ideapoke’s Technology Scouting Analysts continuously analyse and monitor the search results of the Discovery Engine.
Ideapoke’s Discovery Engine uses advanced algorithms to search for matching Innovations and technologies based on key words. These are then shortlisted and re-evaluated for alignment with original customer requirements. The platform shares initial interim reports to the customer and requests for customer feedback to further narrow down or broad-base the search IDEAPOKE helps discover, connect, and collaborate with partners to solve business problems.
It taps collective intelligence by involving customers in defining and creating product or service offerings, thus enhancing the value for both consumers and companies alike and resulting in innovative products.
The Tech
Crowdsourcing and open innovation in the space of breaking down complex problems into simpler smaller sets on a common platform through different devices, and getting ideas and mapping them to the larger problem, is how problems are solved.
Crowdsourcing is already changing from just calling people to present ideas, to, actually integrating and executing the ideas. Not only that, open innovation and crowdsourcing help in streamlining the multiple facets of competitive intelligence and eventually support decision making. We help provide tools that can process all the data and help innovators ask bigger questions and help them think of bigger questions that can be asked.
says Anup.
The company uses Big Data, NLP, and Machine Learning to structure the data for easy search. When the problem statement is received from the user, the software triggers NLP engine to identify requirement and surfaces the most relevant keywords. Web crawlers then will search keywords on the internet and web scrapers will extract data from websites to find solutions using algorithms like cross pollination. “Cross Pollination is the process of solving one industry problem with another,” says the founder.
ProRev Review
ProRev ReviewIdeapoke lists a database of 600,000 + technologies and the numbers are growing fast. The company will soon provide over a million technology listings, as it further diversifies the areas into which it currently lists these technologies.
Moreover, Ideapoke is tapping collective intelligence by involving customers in defining and creating product or service offerings, thus enhancing the value for both consumers and companies. The concept of correlation and collaboration between organizations has a definite future in the ecosystem.
