i8: Reading to Support Innovation
Joe Buzzanga
Elsevier
Realização: Open Patrocínio Oficial e
Innovation Center - Brasil Colaboração: Allagi –
Open Innovation Services
São Paulo, Brasil
23/10/2009

i8: Reading to Support Innovation
Joe Buzzanga
Product Manager, Elsevier
October 23, 2009
1

The Innovation Journey
Innovation is an essential route
to business growth.
•BCG study: innovation a top strategic
imperative
http://www.bcg.com/impact_expertise/publicati
ons/files/BCG_Innovation_2009_Apr_2009.pdf
But without the right information
to guide clear decision making,
a timely and successful outcome
is not assured.

Innovation Begins with Challenges
A risk averse culture and lengthy development times are the biggest
hurdles to improving return on investment innovation spending
Making Better Bets –
Risk Management What are the biggest obstacles you face when it comes to generating a
return on your investments in innovation?
Risk averse culture 29
Lengthy development times 27
Lack of coordination
within company 23
Difficulty selecting the right
Time Savings ideas to commercialize 22
Compensation not tied to
innovation results 22
Inability to adequately measure
performance 21
Ineffective marketing &
communications 20
Insufficient support from
leadership & management
20
Not enough customer insight 17
Not enough great ideas 17
0 5 10 15 20 25 30
Percentage of respondents
Source: BCG 2009 Senior Executive Survey

The Critical Front End of the Innovation Process
Get on the right track early to avoid increased risk and cost
$$
$$$
• Lots of ideas and information at the front end
• Need to accelerate through the screens and gate reviews
Projects need to move forward or be eliminated quickly.

Making the Right “Bet” Requires the Right Information
And Information overload is getting bigger
Digital Information Created, Captured, Replicated Worldwide
Exabytes “Searching for meaning in the
1,800 content of unstructured data
Tenfold Growth like images, video clips,
documents, and the numbers
in Five Years! and characters in databases is
the rocket science of the
digital universe.” IDC
0
2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
Source: IDC Whitepaper, The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe, March 2008

Searching Can Be Difficult
But it is essential for open innovation

Mystery Equation
mystery clip

Why is Research is Getting Harder Instead of Easier?
Current General Search
Get millions of documents
Natural Sweetener
to sift through
Page 1 Page 2 Page 180,000
There is just no way any researcher can read through all this information.
It simply takes too long!

Searching for the Right Answers the Wrong Way
Researchers spending more time looking for information
than analyzing and applying it
2008 Searching
and gathering
information
9.5 hours/
week
9.2 hours/
week Organizing, analyzing
and applying
information
* Source: 2008 survey from IDC

Costing you Time and Money
100 people
on staff
× 9.5 hours a week ×
per person searching
Working
50 weeks / year
× Making $30 an hour
($60,000 a year base)
That is $1,425,000 in hidden search costs per year that you are spending!
How much time could your organization save?
* Source: IDC Hidden Costs of Searching 2008

What if You Could be More Effective at Scoping Opportunities
• Quickly explore and understand new
markets and areas to assess
commercial opportunities Te
les
co
pe
• Effectively find people, companies
and organizations for potential
partners, suppliers or alliances
• See new ideas and uses for
technologies from places you never
would have thought to look before

illumin8 Does That For You
Organizes and presents more relevant insights, faster
• Rapid summary
• Unique category
of results
• Visually compelling
landscape
Confidently explore new markets and technologies

Using Computational Linguistics to “read”
Bringing together content from authoritative sources and the web
Web Journal Patent
8 Billion web 3 Million full-text scientific and
22 Million patents from 5
pages, blogs technical articles
world-wide patent offices
and forums 36 Million scientific records
Organizing results and presenting relevant
Creating landscape overviews about Companies,
information from billions of web pages and the
Products, People, etc.,
worlds most trusted scientific content

Chemical Company Identifies Technology Partner
• Business Opportunity: Enter the
emerging market for solar shingles or “illumin8 brought everything
Building Integrated Photovoltaic (BIPV) together instead of having to
solutions for residential applications search [other resources first].”
• Research Challenge: Who are potential “There are usually companies
technology partners? What products are on out there doing things you may not
the market already? know about it. [The illumin8
overview of results] shows you
Solution: illumin8
names that you [don’t realize] you
• Creates list of companies already involved in the space
are looking for. For our business,
• Identifies experts to speak with sometimes it is easier to acquire
• Provides list of commercial products using the technology than develop internally, so if
• Helps build knowledge of the market space someone is out there developing
• Export results and share findings with team something that you need; you want
to know it.”
Results: Created strategy to engage with technology partner;
results from illumin8 gave confidence they could provide a unique New Business Development Leader,
value Fortune 100, Chemical Company
• Information from illumin8 helps with recommendation pursue or
stop opportunity
• Use insights from findings to put together a strategy of how
to penetrate the market

illumin8 DEMO

illumin8 is helping innovators save time and make the right bets
A new search-engine tool geared to packaging research and development could
help reduce the risk of R&D investments and locate the right development targets.
Packaging Strategies Magazine
iIlumin8 is set to become the Google of the Innovation Space.
Economist.com
“… It’s a valuable tool for technology landscaping. I think it really gives you a
sense of what’s going on in terms of activity and distribution of activities.”
Innovation Manager, Fortune 100 Chemical
Company