Leveraging a Universal Innovation Taxonomy: Driving New Engagements and Diverse Partnerships between U.S. Universities and Industry Innovators

Award ID: 2337742

Academic-industry partnerships fuel innovation in health, sustainability, defense, and other areas. While various bespoke services connect subsets of academic researchers with industry, there is no centralized platform for researchers across a wide range of universities and companies to easily identify areas of mutual interest and connect using a shared taxonomy. This gap results in missed opportunities for breakthrough innovations that depend on the unique and varied backgrounds of diverse participants. To address this gap in the partnering ecosystem, this project will explore how an open and accessible digital platform that leverages a universal innovation taxonomy can drive new engagements between U.S. universities and industry innovators. The project team will explore what enables or blocks successful matchmaking and how a digital platform can democratize access to industry partners regardless of a researchers geography or institutional status. To maximize impact, this project will involve the design and deployment of software features accessible to users (rather than pure prototypes for lab testing purposes). As a result, these features will not only support this research undertaking, but will also facilitate new, diverse, sustainable and impactful real-world partnering relationships. In this project, the research efforts will focus on developing effective ways to grow networks of researchers and industry partners within the specific domain of materials science and engineering. The team will investigate the projects central hypothesis that: employing a universal taxonomy to (a) categorize university and company researchers, (b) support effective discovery and matchmaking, and (c) facilitate a self-reinforcing cycle of network population growthwill drive new and more diverse partnerships across all institutions. The focus of this effort will be to to demonstrate that this kind of an approach will be valuable especially to institutions that are classified as Carnegie R2. After an operational setup, the project will follow three phases. The team will (1) develop tools for categorizing and matchmaking researchers, (2) drive growth of the researcher population using materials sciences as the initial exemplar domain. The procedure will consist of qualitative research, prototyping, implementation, and data collection and analysis. The analysis and suggestions for future exploration will be shared within the scientific community through publications, conferences, and events (such as a joint webinar series with a relevant trade organization) and promoted more broadly as a matter of public interest. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Program Director: Pradeep Fulay