Invention Machine's Goldfire 6.0 Helps ID the Experts

Headlining the latest release of Invention Machine's Goldfire innovation platform is new expert identification technology that automatically connects innovation workers with domain experts in real time.

Goldfire 6.0's new technology is part of Invention Machine's strategy to help companies create innovation communities as well as establish sustainable and repeatable best practices around innovation. "[With this release], we're helping companies tap into the tribal wisdom of the organization," says Jim Todhunter, Invention Machine's chief technology officer. "There's a tremendous amount of knowledge in organizations with no good way to tap into it. We're providing a mechanism so that knowledge workers addressing different innovation imperatives can at any time reach out to a broader community and find out who knows what they need to know when they need to know it."

The automated expert identification mechanism employs different approaches to "understand" who knows what about the different subject matter areas, Todhunter says. The Goldfire platform, which is integrated with the corporate address book, considers such factors as authorship of internal documents, email, human resource records, skills databases and dialogs occurring inside the Goldfire innovation communities or within external enterprise forums like Wikis to make recommendations on relevant domain experts. "This will allow people to tap into resources anywhere within the enterprise – within a division, even across a language barrier," Todhunter says.

In addition to making the connections, Goldfire 6.0 indexes the exchanges so anytime someone enters the system to look for answers to a similar problem, they will automatically be directed to those exchanges. "We're aiming to provide a platform robust enough to handle the high-value, discrete innovation initiatives, but at the same time provide a sustainable, repeatable environment to support the everyday innovation work that takes place in the enterprise," Todhunter says.

In addition to the expert identification capabilities, Goldfire 6.0 has additional content, including patents from local authorities in France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom along with an additional pre-indexed 3.5 million documents from 1,100 deep Web sites. The software also has intra-lingual capabilities so users can read the summaries in their own languages.