Search technology with MIT roots takes hold

A search technology developed at the MIT Media Lab is helping some Fortune 500 companies uncover new markets and trends by examining consumer sentiment found on the Web.

Accelovation, which was founded in 2003 and is based one block away from Google in Mountain View, Calif., has been operating in stealth mode until this week, when it began briefing reporters. Company officials say they have two dozen customers in the Fortune 500, including 3M, Procter & Gamble, General Mills and Clorox. The idea is to find new technologies for existing market needs or new markets for existing technologies.

The Accelovation market-discovery software crawls 3 billion Web pages, and has identified a billion market needs and 1.7 billion potential solutions to those needs, according to Jens Tellefsen, vice president of products.

Publicly available content, such as blog postings and customer forums, are among the information sources. Accelovation also has an agreement to crawl information from Reed Elsevier, which owns LexisNexis and has databases of peer-reviewed journals and patents.

“We will identify any statement that talks about a need for something, or a claim or solution for something,” Tellefsen says. “That can be an individual talking about how annoying it is to cook, or to use a particular product, to people that are dying or suffering from some disease . . . to companies that are looking for new ways to do something.”

The technology isn’t cheap. Customers “pay anywhere from $50,000 to $75,000 for a few sets of searches, to hundreds of thousands of dollars for a yearly subscription,” he says.

Momentive Performance Materials, a former division of GE, was willing to pay the price to identify potential new applications and markets for a wetting technology it makes for the agricultural industry. The technology today is used with solutions containing pesticides and water, and causes water to penetrate leaves deeply instead of just rolling off the surface.

Based on Accelovation search results, Momentive is developing a new version of its technology aimed at a different market, according to Mary Gum, leader of Momentive’s innovation council.

“The one thing I was impressed at was the quality of the hits,” she says. “What we did is put in all the technical strengths or benefits of our technology. They do their magic in the black box and out come all their hits.”

Gum did not identify the new product Momentive is making, because it is still being developed. What Accelovation allowed the company to do is find a problem its technology could solve and pick the market and application with which it would have the highest probability of success, she says.

In addition to using Accelovation, Momentive speaks with customers and buys industry market studies to uncover this type of information. Often, those market studies are dated by the time they are released, Gum says. These traditional market studies and internal assessments are still necessary in addition to Accelovation, however, because the search software does not identify the size of a market, she says.