Elsevier Upgrades illumin8

Elsevier, the world's leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services today announced the expansion of illumin8, its groundbreaking semantic search tool first launched in 2008. illumin8, which indexes scientific, patent, news and web content from Elsevier and other trusted sources, now offers a range of new features. These include an improved ability to explore technology trends and white space opportunities, evaluate potential new technologies and product applications, and compare organizations, products, people and approaches.

"The early stage of the innovation process is often referred to as the fuzzy front-end. At this point in our customers' workflow, using regular search can feel like reaching around in the dark, especially when they are dealing with unfamiliar markets or emerging technologies or products," said Robbertjan Kalff, VP for Product Development for Engineering and Technology and Alternative Energy at Elsevier. "Users say that this is the time where they don't know what they don't know, but at the same time they need a way to get on the right track faster. This is the need that illumin8 addresses."

The functionality of illumin8 is further enhanced by the introduction of illumin8 Reports-- customizable documents that users can create to share their findings and analysis of a research topic. The new functionality was developed based on customer requests and testing with a representative group drawn from the thousands of illumin8 users worldwide -- including innovation leaders and R&D scientists and engineers from leading Fortune 500 companies. illumin8 customers come from across industries such as Automotive, Chemicals, and Consumer Packaged Goods, and the web-based tool has been enhanced to closely align with its users' workflow and the questions they need to answer at the front-end of innovation.

illumin8 supports an organization's innovation platform by helping identify new technologies and applications for product development, supporting risk assessment of entering new market space, uncovering competitor activity and helping identify potential new partners or suppliers.  Unlike regular search platforms, illumin8 is able to easily identify and show relationships between concepts and entities such as technologies, organizations, products, and scientific approaches-which is often buried in document text and could take many hours or weeks to capture and assess.

This latest upgrade allows R&D and innovation professionals to quickly access high quality information, uniquely formatting it to their requirements:

• Explore - provides a quick overview of the organizations, products, people and approaches related to a technology or other topic, allowing users to quickly grasp the 'who and what' of a market space.
• Evaluate -supports investigation of the related benefits and applications of a technology, process or product. Potential risks and problems   are uncovered, which can help speed the product development process and uncover opportunities to fill a potential gap in the market
• Compare   -generates side by side views of  two organizations, potential partners or products to support the evaluation of current or potential competitors or to help identify possible partners
• Report -illumin8 Reports allow users to summarize their analysis of a new technology, product application, competitor or unfamiliar market space, build shortlists with notes for assessing potential partners, suppliers, and experts, highlight the most relevant results and records from scientific journals, patents, news and web sources and output all their findings in a customizable document.

illumin8 has become a vital part of the R&D process for those on the cutting edge of innovation. The introduction of these four new features will help further enable users to quickly discover and share new information at the front end, which in turn informs and speeds up product and partnering decisions.