Case study

Competitive assessment analysis

Objective: Follow the pace of knowledge and identify key concepts and documents to assist Research and Management Teams in maintaining and expanding innovation advance.

we describe mining and exploration methods we created to identify key point , domain excellence, direct and indirect human expertise, collaboration, competences and emerging trends in the field of DNA technologies applied to medical diagnostic

The starting point

The Company A wants to study the advances in technology and knowledge of DNA chip technologies for diagnostics purpose. From Biological database, keywords “DNA diagnostic microarray technology” were used to retrieve 700 scientific publications for further mining and explorations into INTELLIXIR SYSTEM.

After a few minutes after adding the documents, the patent and scientific analyst of the Company A starts to work. So he’s wondering “ab initio” “What are the major topics today in "DNA chips for diagnostic use”?

Apparition and increase of concepts.

Follow the pace of knowledge and identify key concepts and documents to assist research and management teams in maintaining competitive advance.

Mining and exploration of scientific publications.

You might need to view data in various ways to capture key knowledge. For example, you might want to view areas of research in a specific order or see only a subset of the areas.

Dynamic Term Cloud was developed by us to get multi-filtering and sorting capabilities. Thus, you can isolate areas the most efficient way.

Multi-filtering and sorting methods.

Words are classified according to their occurrence by the size and color of the police. Multi-filtering of occurrences of concepts, co-occurrences between two concepts, date of apparition and lifetime of concepts is provided to ensure precise filtering.

Capture many areas of knowledge at the same time

“Apoptosis , tumor , cancer, gene expression profile or RNA” are biotehcnical and scientifical terms with the higher frequency found in all publication of clinical DNA Chip technology published.

Human expertise and Teamwork.

Human expertise is the focus of our work because we think that it’s where the richness is. As you might follow employees that move from one organization to another, maps are an efficient tool to which understand the “savoir-faire” of an expert along the way (figure ).

Co-occurrence maps called organizing maps are a valuable tool to represent Person, alone or in a research or development team. You can see ideas coming up, association of concepts and eventually the evolution of ideas. You might want to export maps into your synthesis file with a mouse click.

Major organizations of the knowledge field.

You might need to know companies or institutions that play a major role in the area. Table and map below show major organization documents and collaborations sorted by order of numbers of publication ( figure). Tables can be exported to excel or Word with a mouse click to insert them directly in your reports.

1999: first four research teams are from England , Germany and USA	1999 - 2000 : French, Australian and Danish teams are starting to publish on microarrays diagnostic. Gene Mutation in cancer, Chromosomal aberrations, infectious diseases are tested for diagnosis with microarrays.
2001 - 2003: Japanese, Korean teams, Italian and a growing number of american teams are publishing cutting edge articles on the subjet. New applications like Tissue microarray came up and became a very important field of research for diagnostic of human diseases.	2005 - 2007: more austrian and german universities are publishing on serotyping of bacteria and plant environmental analysis.

Identification of major universities doing DNA microarrays Diagnostic

A list and a map identifies the main organizations working in the field of DNA Microarrays diagnostic :

Conclusions

This initial study brings important points to the company A in the search for technological and competitive intelligence on DNA microarrays and diagnostic. This study was conducted in two hours, time of collection and processing of information included. The graphical tools enables scientific analyst to assess a maximum areas in the shortest time possible.

Evaluate the human expertise

Follow new development in a research field

Detect Internal or external Collaborations

Identify competences and know how of organizations or experts

Dynamic Term Cloud and Co-occurrences maps are turning Knowledge into an practical application

Main areas discovered will help determine whether the company covers all or part of these areas, to decide, for instance, to go to one of the subject area, or to ascertain whether the company is a precursor

Export graph and maps as image and insert them to excel or word document with a mouse click