Traditionally, companies look to develop new inventions to solve problems that they already know about or to deal with the challenges that are posed by new circumstances that present themselves. Now, Iprova has used its unrivalled expertise and experience in the application of AI and NLP technologies in the invention and innovation arena to enable companies to discover new and valuable problems , using its market-leading Invention Studio software platform.
This important new Invention Studio module, Opportunity Atlas, helps companies to seek out, identify and understand relevant and valuable problems, but which are currently unseen as they may be new or in rapidly emerging areas - a process known as “problem mining”. Critically and uniquely, not only can companies identify previously unknown or unrecognised problems using Opportunity Atlas, they can also then incorporate these into Iprova’s already established invention creation process. This can then drive the creation of breakthrough inventions to address the problem identified and provides the company with opportunities to disrupt the market at the optimum time.
Commenting on the new breakthrough functionality, Julian Nolan, CEO of Iprova said: “By introducing this ground-breaking problem mining capability to Invention Studio, Iprova is providing its customers with a unique solution – not only do we enable them to identify relevant problems, but we also then empower them to create inventions in real-time to solve these problems. Problems may also be those which are associated with a specific stage of a B2B or B2C experience journey, making this an especially powerful tool for bringing new value-creating features to products by anticipating potentially important, but currently unknown, problems. By introducing Opportunity Atlas, Iprova is now uniquely placed to provide a true end-to-end approach – from problem detection through to invention creation. This is valuable to our customers, as they can easily identify unseen but valuable problems, and then create and patent inventions which directly enable new product features which exploit the opportunity presented by the problem”.
Julian continued “We expect Opportunity Atlas to benefit a number of uses including:
- B2B products: Identify previously unseen but relevant and valuable problems across an ecosystem that users and/or buyers of a product are experiencing or may face in the future – and hence be able to create, and patent, inventions which solve these ahead of competitors.
- B2C products: Identify unseen but relevant and valuable problems across an experience journey that users of a product are experiencing or may face in the future, and create patentable inventions which reduce the associated pain points – or which enable new pleasure points - at key stages of the experience journey.
- Valuable patent portfolios: Enable the creation of inventions which are the preferred solution to a problem ahead of competitors by being among the first to identify high value problems which are relevant to large markets.
These are then areas that we help our clients to address with breakthrough inventions, so we help them to locate problems, but also help create inventions which provide a solution.”
Julian then concluded by saying that “Problem mining is going to be a critical activity for many companies over the coming years. Iprova’s ability to provide the unique combination of problem identification with invention creation gives us the ability to supply an end-to-end solution. With further exciting enhancements to Invention Studio’s already impressive feature-set scheduled for release throughout the year, 2023 already promises to be an exciting year.”
