IAM Alert: Invention Machine Goldfire 6.0 Brings Collaboration and Experts to Mix
Information Architected Market Alert (IAM Alert):
Invention Machine (headquartered in Boston) announced yesterday the availability of Invention Machine Goldfire 6.0 with integrated collaboration and expert identification technologies to further accelerate product innovation. (see press release from Invention Machine)
Beyond Individual Innovators
Historically, Invention Machine’s Goldfire has been oriented towards providing an individually focused innovation “workbench” for the lone researcher or inventor. The offering combined (and continues to offer) advanced techniques and technologies such as semantic search capabilities, process modeling (typically in support of the assembled artifact of a product), knowledge mining, and knowledge re-use to decrease the amount of time it takes for individual engineers (much of the environment is modeled in support of physical rather than intellectual property inventions) or inventors/innovators to analyze a particular problem or set of problems, and uncover the ripest areas to go forth and solve the problem.
The offering has been and appears to remain one of the most advanced convergence of these technologies and techniques that we have seen in the innovation management space, and in many ways, is truly a solution with no direct, out of the box, commercial competition.
This is both a blessing and a curse, as markets are not typically made up of a company of one, but an ecosytem of competing products.
Innovation Market Maturity
As the company and it’s offerings have matured, and frankly, as the general awareness of innovation management has matured as well, there has been more of a push, alongside the rise of Enterprise 2.0 (meaning in most cases, collaboration) to support team-based or collaborative efforts at digitally supporting and scaling innovation capabilities.
With Goldfire 6.0, Invention Machine has added the collaboration-oriented ability to:
- Automatically identify and connect innovation workers with domain experts within their network
- Empower the community with precise “innovation intelligence” (similar to the “relationship intelligence” brought about by social network analysis and social computing I’d begun writing about in 2004 – see “Death of a Salesman? Birth of Relationship Intelligence” – now read over 4,000 times on Scribd) by leveraging undocumented expertise from problem-sharing dialogues, capturing and processing those discussions as reusable corporate assets.
From the managerial (top-down) aspect of Innovation Management, v6.0 provides:
- The ability to measure company-wide innovation initiatives and trends in real time.
With this third component, they have now begun to straddle three distinct layers – tools providing benefits to individuals (the original offering), to teams, and through to managers/executives.
Trend Watch
This offer is indicative of a two-part growing trend, collectively defined as “convergence”:
- The convergence of tools to deliver value to individuals up through the executive suite (traditional enterprise software tends to focus on only one extreme or the other)
- The convergence of process, information, content, knowledge and search techologies into a unified and pre-packaged business application (as opposed to a technology focused on a specific issue/problem)
Keep an eye open for areas where these trends are surfacing as business needs within your own organization, as this convergence is happening more and more, particularly as the realities of competition in the current economic environment continue to be challenging.
Combine those trends with the rising trend of innovation management maturity, and we’re (finally?) witnessing a triple convergence for business innovation.
Your Thoughts?
If you are a current or prospective user of Invention Machine, or any innovation management related solution, please weigh in with your feedback. Are current offerings serving your needs? Running ahead of where your organization is? Where your budget is? Just right? If not using Invention Machine’s Goldfire, but solving similar problems, what solution are you using?
How We Can Help
These trends, and solutions such as Invention Machine’s Goldfire 6.0, are an argument and opportunity for the explicit focus of our business practices and expertise, which is in creating strategies to provide for flexible information architectures and applications (technologies) that support the business architecture (roles, goals, people, processes, skills and culture) that, when combined, can deliver significantly greater value than a single business problem and isolated tool by itself. We call this an Innovation Architecture.
If we can be of help via our assessments, consulting or workshops, contact us now to schedule a private 30-minute executive briefing on how we can most effectively work together.
Tags: business architecture, Collaboration, Convergence, E2.0, Enterprise 2.0, expertise location, goldfire, IAM Alert, Information Architecture, innovation, Innovation Management, integration, invention machine, Knowledge Management