Artificial intelligence used for new inventions unveiled

The AI technology helping the world’s biggest tech companies invent faster

Swiss technology company Iprova has unveiled artificial intelligence technology that augments human intelligence, allowing the right invention to be created at the right time in a way that has never before been possible – and over 20 of the world’s best-known businesses have already benefited.

Iprova has helped world-leading businesses speed up and diversify their innovation, helping them to benefit from opportunities driven by the huge levels of convergence which are occurring between previously unrelated industries. Iprova has been successful in creating inventions based on these points of convergence, which may become or provide the foundation for new products and services across a wide range of industries and sectors. These include autonomous vehicles, next-generation telecommunications, healthcare, wearables and mobile devices.

Iprova’s technology makes inventive sense of vast amounts of publicly available information by detecting day-to-day social, market and technological changes to help enable new inventions. This and other information is then used by Iprova’s invention developers to create disruptive inventions in a timely manner.

The technology brings together topics from seemingly distant areas, for example, inventively connecting an advance in geographic mapping to elevator scheduling, or an advance in autonomous vehicle control systems to personal healthcare. Other examples include connecting a specific drug delivery technique to a high value oil exploration problem, and the introduction of LED backlit displays to gesture recognition.

The company has kept a discreet profile since its inception, allowing global brands including Philips, Panasonic, and Deutsche Telekom to file hundreds of new patents based on its inventions. These inventions may provide the foundation for new products and services across a wide range of industries and sectors.

Iprova’s inventions are driven by advances outside of the areas where its customers are active, and are complementary to those created in their R&D labs.

Iprova’s approach creates inventions which have an improved chance of being disruptive due to their diversity and timing. During a recent project with Philips focused on nutrition, Iprova contributed to inventions driven by diverse advances in areas including healthcare, video processing, materials, genetics and predictive learning.

“Iprova complements Philips’ own research activities with its out-of-the-box inventions”, says Maaike van Velzen, Head of IP Portfolio Management at Philips. “I am very impressed with Iprova’s technical expertise and advanced thinking.”

Iprova’s approach also enables the first inventions to be delivered just a few weeks after the start of a project. For example, when Panasonic wanted to create new services for the future automotive sector, Iprova delivered the initial inventions within four weeks. Each invention was supported by a revenue model outlining its commercial potential.

“Working with Iprova allowed us to efficiently acquire disruptive, yet commercially relevant, inventions which support Panasonic’s business strategy and objectives in the automotive area”, said Yoshiaki Tokuda, Director of Intellectual Property Center, Panasonic Corporation.

“The single biggest revolution in innovation over the past decade has been an increased reliance on external idea sources to find the next new thing. Iprova is taking this one step further on by broadening the field of search and adding a degree of dependability to the pursuit of innovation. The result is that Iprova has been able to raise the probability of innovation payoff”, says Bill Fischer, Professor of Innovation Management at IMD and an advisor to Iprova.

Iprova CEO and founder Julian Nolan describes how AI can make the difference in accelerating disruptive innovation: “Iprova is using AI and other technologies to bring a data-driven approach to physical science invention. We have repeatedly heard that companies want to create disruptive inventions faster and in a more predictable way. By using a data-driven approach to help deliver tangible and sustainable research outcomes, we can deliver exactly this.”