I’m Gelareh, a PhD student at university of Vienna in Computer Science. After several years in an academic atmosphere, I decided to join industry to use my academic background in practice. So, I joined VentureRadar to bridge my gap between academia and industry.

Today was a first day of my work as a data scientist intern. Here I wish to share my first general overview of the concept of “Open Innovation”, which is one of the most important concerns of VentureRadar, and also some thoughts on how machine learning can help corporations that engage in Open Innovation.

“Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean.” Ryunosuke Satoro

We are living in an era where knowledge is evolving at a rapid speed and at the same time is more widely distributed. So, one of the main challenges of corporations is that they can no longer rely on developing all their new innovations internally, but have to find ways to engage with external innovators.

VentureRadar addresses this challenge of Open Innovation by connecting corporations to the emerging technologies and expertise that can solve their challenges.  During my internship I’ll  be helping to investigate  how  we  can  use  machine  learning  techniques  to  try  and  enable this  process  to  become  more  efficient, accurate  and intelligent.

It seems that nowadays, for many organisations, open innovation is not just an option but also a basic requirement because they cannot do every thing internally. So, opening up the innovation process will most likely intensify in the future.

I’m looking forward to being able to help change the way the process operates, working on projects including (1) researching how to develop a machine learning model to predict the future growth and innovations scores of companies in the VentureRadar database, which will give organization an insight to select and collaborate with each other with more knowledge and wisdom, (2) investigating how to integrate an improved recommender system to offer a range of similar companies to any specific company based on their business activity, and (3) seeking how to build an intelligent text retrieval model to extract key words and key phrases semantically.

I think Artificial Intelligence can play an important role to make Open Innovation easier, faster and much more efficient than what it was before. I will share my research outcomes and findings here to let you know how our projects progress.