The Northwestern Innovation Institute has launched an expanded version ofInnovationInsights, an AI-powered platform that helps universities identifyresearch with commercialization potential. The new version is now available toapproximately 20 university partners participating in Bridge, a data-sharinginitiative focused on research commercialization.
Building on the platform’s original People Finder capability, the latestrelease introduces Idea Finder, a new tool that identifies individual researchpapers and grants with high commercialization potential. The underlying modelshave been evaluated both against historical data and in a real-world randomizedfield experiment.
The updated platform also features enhanced researcher profiles, improvedsearch capabilities, and new tools for saving promising research and trackingfaculty outreach—all designed to help technology transfer professionals movemore efficiently from identifying opportunities to taking action.
Idea Finder: Identifying Promising Research
While People Finder helps universities identify researchers with untappedcommercialization potential, the new Idea Finder enables users to pinpointspecific research that may hold commercial promise.
Idea Finder allows technology transfer professionals to explore twocategories of research: published papers (including preprints) and awardedresearch grants. Users can search by research topic or author, filter resultsby publication or grant year, and rank research by its predictedcommercialization potential. For awarded grants, the platform also displaysfunding amounts, providing additional context for evaluating potentialopportunities.
Each result includes a commercialization potential score, helping usersprioritize research that may warrant further investigation. By identifyingpromising work at the individual paper or grant level, Idea Finder providesanother pathway for discovering commercialization opportunities that mightotherwise be overlooked.
Enhanced Researcher Profiles and Search
The latest release also improves People Finder, offering enhanced searchcapabilities and more comprehensive researcher profiles.
Faculty profiles now feature a visualization of publicationcommercialization potential over time, allowing users to see how a researcher’swork has evolved and identify publications with particularly high potential.
Users can also explore individual publications and research grantsdirectly from faculty profiles, gaining a more detailed understanding of aresearcher’s work and its potential commercial applications.
Together, these enhancements help technology transfer professionals movebeyond identifying promising researchers to understanding which of theirdiscoveries may be worth pursuing.
From Discovery to Action
Finding promising research is only the beginning. The next challenge isdetermining which opportunities to pursue and maintaining engagement with theresearchers behind them.
The new version of InnovationInsights introduces features to supportthese next steps.
Users can now save promising papers and grants for future reference,making it easier to revisit potential opportunities and prioritize follow-upactivities.
They can also add private notes to faculty profiles, documenting outreachactivities, recording interactions, and planning next steps. These notes remainaccessible within the platform, helping users organize their engagement withresearchers.
By integrating these features into the research discovery process,InnovationInsights helps technology transfer professionals translate insightsinto concrete follow-up actions.
With the latest release now available to approximately 20 Bridgeuniversity partners, InnovationInsights continues to evolve as a resource forresearch commercialization.
By combining researcher discovery, AI-powered assessments of individualpapers and grants, and tools for managing follow-up activities, the platformaims to help universities uncover more promising opportunities and take thenext steps toward bringing academic discoveries into the real world.
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