Asking the right Questions! How to Match Expertise and People for Innovation

A central challenge is to bring the people together to create innovations. Traditionally this works only with a high density of experts, entrepreneurs, and customers, e.g. silicon valley. In distributed settings on a European scale this does not work, despite the existence of matching platforms.

We take a different approach that is inspired by matching people in online dating. Individuals and companies often don't know what they can offer or what they need. Hence we suggest a more holistic approach. Based questions asking about skills, interest, values, approaches, existing collaborations and digital artifacts (code, images, algorithms) we envision an intelligent matching platform.

We will run a workshop to understand the right questions, what artifacts are telling, and what good indicators for potential collaborations are. We also want to run a workshop to identify AI techniques for making the matches and for identifying the system architecture of the platform.

Output

catalog of questions as the basis for the matching platform

a system architecture for the platform

set of candidate algorithms for matching

Presentations

Project Partners:

• German Entrepreneurship GmbH, Jan Alpmann
• Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU), Albrecht Schmidt
• Volkswagen AG, Gülce Cesur

Primary Contact: Jan Alpmann, German Entrepreneurship

Main results of micro project:

The main results of the micro project include a detailed questionnaire based on qualitative interviews with different matching experts. The questionnaire is tailored to different user groups and represents a key building block for the development of future matching platforms. In addition, we conducted a live matching event entitled “AI Idea Prize: Show, Pitch and Match“ that brought together students in the field of AI and business experts. This event further informed our concept of a future matching platform and helped to finalize the questionnaire.

Contribution to the objectives of HumaneAI-net WPs

The elaborated questionnaire and the developed concept of the matching platform both pursue the aim of bringing the different players in the AI ecosystem together, which are normally not in contact. The overarching goal is to strengthen the EU AI Community in order to increase the knowledge transfer between startups, academia and industry and therefore enable organizations that are compatible with European and Humane values.

Tangible outputs

• Other: Event documentation of the AI Idea Price – Jan Alpmann
• Other: Video recording of qualitative interviews – Jan Alpmann / Dennis Elflein
• Other: Questionnaire of the matching platform – Jan Alpmann / Dennis Elflein