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When I first started at Exaptive as a Media Specialist, I heard there was a Design Team, and that they had meetings. I immediately thought, That sounds like a team I should be on! I should go to those meetings. We use design every day in marketing and communications. So, I get to the meeting, and it turns out they are focused on designing the software and the data model.

I don’t code!

When the United Nations released a report earlier this year that a catastrophic two-degree Celsius (3.6-degree Fahrenheit) rise in global average temperatures is expected to occur in the next decade, there was a media firestorm about the dire predictions. You know who wasn’t surprised? Climate scientists. (Read about the difference a half-a-degree can make.)

How do you pick who works together, who reports to whom, and who exchanges information with whom? Usually it gets done within a department, within a project team, or based on some other common ground. It turns out we should be focusing on our differences a bit more.

“Good ideas are getting harder to find,” Exaptive CEO Dave King quotes a recent paper by MIT and Stanford researchers. He points to the skyrocketing number of researchers employed in the U.S. and contrasts it with the inverse slope on a chart monitoring efficiency of researchers along the same timeline. “Those growing number of researchers are failing to produce value that outpaces what we’re spending to innovate.”

Since Exaptive launched in 2011, we’ve worked with many researchers, particularly in medicine and the natural sciences. PubMed®, a medical journal database, pops up repeatedly as a key tool for these researchers to develop hypotheses. It’s a tool built in a search-and-find paradigm with which we’re all familiar. Execute a keyword search. Get a list of results. Visualization can make search - and, therefore, research - much more meaningful.

Faster is different. It sounds strange at first because we expect faster to be better. We expect faster to be more. If we can analyze data faster, we can analyze more data. If we can network faster, we can network with more people. Faster is more, which is better, but more is different.

The Researchers, Principal Investigators, and Science Writers we’ve talked to seem to have a love-hate relationship with PubMed. They love that a simple search can get them quick access to the latest articles but they hate the limiting interface and how much reading is required to find good articles. They told us they aren’t always sure they got all the right articles and that they want a more efficient and customized system that meets more of their needs and gets better over time as it learns from their behavior.

So many fantastic quotes are attributed to Albert Einstein. If you hear our CEO Dave King speak, he may bring up his favorite: “Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.” To have an aha moment, we have to play with a challenge from a variety of perspectives. We have to build collaborative teams to tackle complex problems.

Figuring out how to build the team with the greatest chance for success can be complicated. Ideal innovation partners may be isolated geographically, in different time zones, or just not aware of the skills their coworkers can bring to a project. At Exaptive, our main goal is to facilitate innovation. We use sophisticated technology to help groups assemble research teams for collaboration, and we've found we can demonstrate the concept on paper. Cue the choir as the gates open to Exaptive’s Cognitive City!

One thing we love doing at Exaptive – aside from creating tools that facilitate innovation – is hiring intelligent, creative, and compassionate people to fill our ranks. Frank Evans is one of our data scientists. He was invited to present at the TEDxOU event on January 26, 2018.

Frank gave a great talk about how to go beyond data visualization to data applications. The verbatim of his script is below the video. Learn more about how to build data applications here.