Relecura is delivering intelligence for innovation with its analytics platform
If one thinks about the innovation ecosystem and the related economy in its entirety, it is vast. This ecosystem generates new ideas for novel products and services to meet the evolving needs of customers. It also disseminates these ideas and subsequently converts them to actual products.
Relecura - developed by INDUS TechInnovations - offers an analytics platform, delivering intelligence to technology developers, inventors, Intellectual Property (IP) professionals and corporate leaders. This, in turn, helps them generate ideas and make better decisions on new products and services.
The platform supports tasks and workflows of importance at various stages of the innovation life-cycle -- from the generation of new product/service ideas, vetting them, converting them into intellectual property assets, managing and utilising these assets in support of the company's business, as well as disseminating and monetizing the inventions through IP licensing, technology transfer and other means.
Why is the innovation economy important?
The institutional stakeholders include the producers of ideas such as universities, research institutes, large corporates, and small businesses. In addition, research & policymaking and trade bodies (both governmental and non-governmental) are involved. These organizations are responsible for studying as well as helping the ecosystem flourish. The participants range from inventors, engineers and other tech developers to Tech Transfer professionals, IP professionals, corporate leaders, regulators, and policy makers.
The value of today's enterprises is largely locked in their intangible assets arising primarily from innovation. A large portion of this value is derived from the Intellectual Property (IP) assets a company holds, which is a by-product of its R&D activities. Hence, IP is inextricably linked to the strategic decision-making of enterprises and is a key driver of its growth and revenues.
Intellectual Property (IP) is the currency of the innovation economy -- be it patents, trademarks, copyrights or other IP assets. There is an active market for IP transactions with multiple players in the chain, including buyers, sellers, licensors & licensees, and brokers & dealmakers - as is the case with other asset classes.
This business end of the innovation economy has its own information requirements, such as valuation as well as price and market discovery. The intangible nature of the assets being transacted pose unique challenges for appropriate and accurate analytics and intelligence.
How have the intelligence needs of this ecosystem been traditionally served?
The intelligence needs of this ecosystem are currently served by a plethora of B2B information products. These are essentially databases of varying kinds -- comprising of academic publications, patent databases, pharma-related information products, gene sequence and molecular structure repositories.
They are typically silos, with no way to seamlessly search and connect the various bits of information in these disparate databases. In order to glean insights for informed decision-making, these are required to be searched for, and connected.
Search and discoverability is a big challenge given the vast and varied amounts of data that have to be sifted through, to arrive at the relevant information set. Most products today have evolved from paper to digital information sources with traditional database indexes and search.
The Relecura story!
INDUS Tech Innovations was established about five years ago with the mission to focus on creating innovative products in India that addressed both the local and global markets.
One high-impact area they are determined to focus on is to create technology components used in building software applications that could go beyond mere keyword search. Their idea was to extract insights from large repositories of unorganized textual data. They had some ideas about using text analysis and machine learning to achieve this goal.
They have prototyped a couple of different applications with these components - one a knowledge discovery product for document repositories (‘KnowledgePad’) and another, which is an interactive learning platform (‘Creonto’).
During the course of this period, they tried applying knowledge discovery approach to searching patent databases via a web-based product that they named ‘Relecura’. ‘Rele’ stands for Relevance whereas ‘Cura’ references to Creation.
Apart from traditional field-based database search offered by other patent search products, Relecura extracted the key ideas (‘concepts’) from the patent documents and connected them in a semantically meaningful way. This provided a novel way of searching and navigating through patent databases and an efficient way to determine related patents.
Recent developments
Relecura has come a long way from the early days. The platform in its current form offers comprehensive solutions across the mobile, web, and APIs for 3rd party app development. The platform incorporates unique features such as Topic Maps to help simplify complex processing and obtain relevant insights. This subsequently supports enterprise innovation management.
They have domestic as well as global customers. Relecura is a best-of-the breed solution, in terms of both the breadth and depth of the features available and the benefits it can deliver.
The team intends to build out Relecura into a comprehensive invention discovery platform providing support to the various practitioners and decision makers involved in the creation of novel products and services, as well as their use and commercialization.
They are implementing cognitive modules into the platform to deliver predictive analytics related to product trends, technology forecasting and paths for new product development.
Relecura's core engine extracts relevant knowledge from large amounts of textual data, connects the knowledge to provide insights, and extends it further via predictive analytics for business and technology intelligence. Built around this core is a platform that is both comprehensive and flexible, and enables third party developers to build other kinds of applications to address their specific requirements.
There are many difficult problems yet to be solved in this space. Looking at it another way -- this makes for a situation where the opportunities to deliver a great deal of value to enterprises is huge.
