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.
