INSIGHTS has been adopted by different organisations
CASE STUDIES
In universities it supports professional staff to map expertise onto funding calls, uncover more academics to engage with, and align business needs with university capabilities. Elsewhere, it has directed and accelerated projects to innovate new product lines and business processes.
Innovation in Higher Education
INSIGHTS Innovate supports research, knowledge exchange and IP teams. It can connect real challenges to the right expertise. Matching funding calls and business problems to relevant academics across the institution and disciplines. There is clear potential in using INSIGHTS Innovate to identify collaborators for consortia and to inform IP and commercialisation decisions.
Key application: matching entered challenges to expertise and surfacing cross-disciplinary connections that manual searching misses.
Case Study Highlight
Matching an SME to cross-disciplinary expertise
An SME approached the Business Engagement team for help finding an academic to clinically validate its AI-enabled women’s health tool. With no specific academic in mind, the team used INSIGHTS Innovate to identify potential matches across the University.
Rather than returning reproductive health specialists alone, INSIGHTS Innovate surfaced expertise spanning endocrinology, psychosocial interventions, clinical guidelines, health data science, human–computer interaction and commercial scalability. Thus, broadening the scope for collaboration and revealing cross-disciplinary connections that might otherwise have been missed.
The team was able to offer the company a range of academics to consider.
Case study from the Business Engagement team at City St George's, University of London.
Entrepreneurship in the Creative Industries
Using INSIGHTS Innovate, sector leaders in the UK’s creative industries explored entrepreneurial strategies through curated reports. The tool surfaced patterns in successful ventures, showing that cross-disciplinary collaboration was a key driver of innovation.
Key application: Extracting innovation themes from sector-specific entrepreneurial data.
Biophilic Design for Creative Architecture
INSIGHTS Innovate was used to analyse case studies of biophilic systems in architectural design. The tool helped identify how natural elements in workspaces enhance creative thinking among architects, revealing a strong link between sensory-rich environments and ideation quality.
Key application: Mapping environmental features to cognitive outcomes in design processes.
Product Innovation for Global White Goods Manufacturing
A worldwide white goods manufacturer used INSIGHTS Innovate to analyse patent information across the consumer products sector. The tool helped identify emerging technology trends and unexplored innovation opportunities by mapping patterns across thousands of patent filings. This enabled the company's R&D team to discover novel combinations of existing technologies leading to new product concepts that balanced technical feasibility with market potential.
Key application: Mining patent databases to uncover cross-domain innovation opportunities and technology convergence patterns.
Addressing Societal Violence through Policy Innovation
Academic researchers used INSIGHTS Innovate to examine public reports and case studies on societal violence. The tool facilitated creative synthesis of policy responses, highlighting the importance of community-led initiatives in reducing harm.
Key application: Structuring diverse evidence into actionable policy concepts.
Oxentia Collaboration: Evaluating INSIGHTS Innovate
In a pioneering project with Oxentia, INSIGHTS Innovate was tested on a real-world client challenge. The evaluation demonstrated the tool’s ability to rapidly generate creative options for innovation strategy, validating its potential for global consultancy use.
Key application: Applying AI-driven ideation to live consultancy projects.