[TMP-020] Asking the right Questions! How to Match Expertise and People for Innovation

Contact person: Jan Alpmann (alpmann@german-entrepreneurship.de) 

Internal Partners:

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

 

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 on questions asking about skills, interest, values, approaches, existing collaborations and digital artifacts (code, images, algorithms) we envision an intelligent matching platform. Through a workshop, we understand the right questions, what artifacts are telling, what good indicators for potential collaborations are, identifying AI techniques for making the matches and for identifying the system architecture of the platform.

Results Summary

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.

Tangible Outcomes

1. Video presentation summarizing the project