By: SpenceDiscovering Business Opportunities for Research IP: NC State and jStart Collaborate
How Big Data Helped NC State Realize Big Opportunities
What happens when you have 3,000 research technologies that represents possible business opportunities for your institution, and only 7 licensing officers to explore the ROI potential of each of those technologies? What happens when each of these technologies may require literally scouring over a million web pages, databases, and feeds? An opportunity to leverage big data analytics.
NC State turned to jStart to help it deal with this business challenge--and turn it into a business opportunity. The jStart team, working with the university's Office of Technology Transfer, created a solution leveraging IBM's Big Data tooling--BigSheets and IBM Content Analytics. After working with the university to understand the challenge, the jStart team created a pilot in which two of the university's 3000 technologies were targeted. The end result? Over 1.4 million web pages and the successful identification of potential business partners and licensors of the two NC State technologies.
In a process that took 7-10 days to conduct the actual analysis (as opposed to the several months it would have taken the university using their current processes), jStart helped NC State's Office of Technology Transfer discover initially thousands of possible partners, and leveraging the IBM analytic tooling, reduce that to hundreds, then a couple dozen, and finally eight "highly prospect" customers. From that list of eight, NC State has now engaged two as potential partners.
Today, jStart continues to work with NC State on a variety of initiatives. IBM has a long history working with academic institutions and universitys, having donated over $11.5M to academic institutions within North Carolina over the past five years. jStart has worked with many universities in the state, including NC State University, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, while IBM has actually has hired over 1200 recruits from North Carolina institutions of higher learning since 2000.
For more details on jStart's involvement in Big Data, you can take a look at our Big Data page, as well as our Text Analytics and Data Analytics pages.
