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New Collaboration with IBM Helps Bring Innovative NC State Technologies to Market

Commercializing new technologies is a multi-phase process that involves matching academic research with potential investors and then working closely with the inventors to provide counsel regarding patents and copyright to assist in determining the most effective methods to take the inventions to market. The biggest challenge in this process is the ability to quickly sort through massive volumes of data to uncover potential investors and partnerships.

To address this challenge, NC State’s Office of Technology Transfer is using IBM’s advanced analytics technology to streamline the time consuming process of searching and matching potential university research projects with investment and partnership opportunities. This allows the NC State team, led by Dr. Mike Kowolenko, industrial fellow with the Center for Innovation Management Studies (CIMS) in NC State’s College of Management, to search through massive amounts of Web data, such as blogs, forums, SEC reports, industry related news sites and government websites. The result is a short list of companies that are likely to be interested in licensing the technologies created at NC State. By streamlining the matching process with business analytics, more advanced technologies will be brought into the market.

For example, a team of researchers at NC State is investigating new strains of Salmonella for use in vaccines. With IBM Big Data analytics technology, it took less than a week for the university to analyze 1.4 million Web pages including opinion blogs, social networks and documents. The analytics technology sorted through a wide variety of information and analyzed the contents in real time to find relevant details and ultimately identifying potential investors and partners to grow the project. Prior to the use of IBM analytics, this process would have taken months and involved dozens of people clipping newspaper reports, visiting Web pages, making telephone calls, hiring translators, and then trying to figure out a way to compare all these information.

From genetics and engineering to technology and climate change, NC State researchers are investigating some of the planet’s toughest questions. As a public institution, NC State is committed to making research results available for public benefit, including through the commercialization of new technologies. Over the past five years, NC State has contributed to the economic development in North Carolina and beyond by spinning out 23 new start-up companies, creating more than 200 jobs.

With the amount of digital data created annually predicted to grow 44-fold over the next ten years, NC State, similar to business and industry, is faced with a big data challenge. The expansive growth and sheer volume of data, some of which contains valuable information for an organization, is making it difficult if not impossible to sort through using traditional methods. Businesses are quickly turning to technology to process the petabytes volumes of data, also known as “Big Data” and extract relevant information.

“In our pilot project, IBM Big Data analytics allowed our team. including faculty in the College of Management, to understand the potential opportunities for our research projects, while at the same time reducing the tedious workload of finding potential investors,” said Billy Houghteling, director of the Office of Technology Transfer at NC State. “This project allows us to concentrate on those activities of highest value and payback for the university.”

Made in IBM Labs – Analytics Addressing Big Data Challenge

Developed in IBM labs around the world, the analytics technology used in the pilot project mines large amounts of unstructured Web data. The analysis is based on factors such as business relevancy, government policies, market needs and trends, etc.

“The volumes of data on our planet are growing exponentially, which represents huge opportunities for organizations that can unlock the insights hidden within the mountains of information,” said Rod Smith, vice president of software technology at IBM. “NC State University sets an example of using smart analysis of big volumes of data to explore and kick start new businesses that push our economy forward.”

As part of this project, NC State is using IBM BigSheets, a part of IBM’s BigInsights portfolio – a software engine that helps get insights from really large data sets easily and quickly; IBM LanguageWare – a text analytics tool created by IBM’s Dublin Software Lab in Ireland for the purpose of harnessing the wealth of unstructured data contained in text documents; Web site content and enterprise applications; and IBM Cognos Content Analytics – an analytics software which gives organizations the necessary tools to access and analyze the volumes of unstructured content. These three components were running on IBM Distribution of Apache Hadoop.

Today, IBM is working with more than 250,000 clients worldwide on analytics projects, including 22 of the top 24 global commercial banks, 18 of the world’s top 22 telecommunication carriers and 11 of the top 12 U.S. specialty retailers.

Real World Connections for Jenkins MBA students

MBA students in the NC State Jenkins Graduate School of Management are also gaining real world experience with the new tools. Five teams of MBA students are currently working on projects for several organizations and firms in Research Triangle Park, N.C., in collaboration with CIMS.

In fact, it was a Jenkins MBA student who helped make connections that led to the NC State – IBM collaborative project. Ryan Brown, who graduated with an MBA degree in 2009 from NC State’s Jenkins Graduate School of Management, made a connection between what he heard in a biosciences management course, taught by Dr. Richard Kouri, and what he learned during his internship with IBM’s jStart Emerging Technologies unit.

Kouri, who is director of the BioSciences Management initiative in the College of Management and leads the biosciences management concentration in the Jenkins MBA program, was explaining to his students how difficult and time-consuming it was for biosciences companies to manually sort through massive amounts of data when searching for potential partners for new product development. After class, Brown told Kouri about the work being done in IBM’s Emerging Technologies office where he had completed an internship that summer. After a series of introduction, Kouri, Kowolenko and Paul Mugge, CIMS director, met with IBM staff to start discussions on the new collaboration involving NC State’s Office of Technology Transfer.

Photo

Left to right: Michael Kowolenko, research fellow, Center for Innovation Management Studies, NC State College of Management; Vladimir Stemkovski, IT architect, managing consultant; Richard Kouri, professor of practice and director, NC State College of Management BioSciences Management Initiative; David Sink, program director, IBM jStart, Emerging Technologies; Paul Mugge, innovation professor and director, NC State College of Management Center for Innovation Management Studies; Sam Thompson, senior IT architect; John Feller, manager, Emerging Technologies Development; Jim Smith, manager, client engagements and chief architect, Emerging Internet Technologies Group

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