City’s Ideapoke: Helping global firms innovate

An Indian aerosol spray company looking for solutions to innovate their product into an eco-friendly propellant free spray was stuck at lack of expertise to design a solution. It was then that a certain company in Israel, with required design skills offered to help. This congruence of requirement and solution was made possible by Ideapoke, a Bengaluru-based startup. Aiming to make things easier for enterprises Ideapoke helps organisations search and collaborate with technology partners across the globe to meet their research and development and product development challenges using data mining. Ideapoke’s database makes use of natural language processing (NLP), big data analytics and machine learning algorithms to retrieve solutions for problem statements.

Companies looking for solutions post a problem statement on the Ideapoke website, which then suggests a solution matching the requirements. “We serve to be a discovery engine for enterprises where solutions are not commercially available,” says Anoop Sahu, co-founder of Ideapoke.

On receiving a problem statement from the user, the software triggers NLP engine to identify requirement and surfaces the most relevant keywords. Web crawlers search keywords on the internet and web scrapers extract data from websites and find solutions using algorithms, like cross-pollination. Cross-pollination, Sahoo explains, is when an industry problem can be solved by another industry.

In a particular instance, a hair color company that was looking for solution to color synthetic fibers used in hair weaving found it with a textile company.

“Initially skeptical of the solution, after 8 to 10 weeks of consulting across India, Europe and US, almost everyone in the team was surprised and delighted that they got a solution from an unexpected source,” said Sanjay Sahoo, vice president, Ideapoke.

Currently focusing on verticals, such as, the Internet of Things and sensors in consumer electronics, chemicals and personal care in fast moving consumer goods, Ideakpoke has also been seeing a demand in water purifiers and water sanitation projects from companies.

Explaining their business model, Sahoo said, Ideapoke charges customers for solutions found through the website, but for partners providing solutions the service is currently free. Ideapoke lists a database of 980,000 technologies, 76,000 companies across the globe doing niche R&D in different areas and 1900 universities globally.