KTN taps into glass.ai to identify emerging technology companies and their decision-makers.

The Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN), which forms part of the UK Government’s technology strategy, aims to connect innovative organisations and research with new partners and opportunities as a driver for growth in the economy. However, trying to identify innovation and the impact of emerging technologies on an economy is complex.

By their very nature, innovative companies are poorly captured by any traditional methods of industry classification. There will be some sections of the emerging technology economy that are captured by targeted company databases (e.g. Beauhurst, FAME, Crunchbase) but building a comprehensive picture of innovation is challenging.

To overcome this challenge, KTN partnered with glass.ai to identify innovative companies across a wide variety of emerging sectors, from AI and Robotics to Circular Plastic and AgriFood technology. Rather than relying on company databases, glass.ai used its unique capability for web-scale language understanding to read the websites of over 2 million UK companies and tailor the language models it uses to identify companies that met the specific characteristics of companies in each of the different emerging sectors. Our intelligent crawler also read social media, news, sector-specific, academic and official sources in order to build a comprehensive picture of the different emerging tech specialisms. Key decision-makers for the selected companies and contact details were also discovered.

KTN has been using the data captured to build emerging industry landscapes which they have started to publish as interactive dashboards:

More dashboards are planned to appear over the coming months, highlighting the national picture of innovation.

At a regional level, emerging technologies are also being investigated as drivers of growth and potential areas for inward investment. To this end, glass.ai has started working with a number of regional economic development agencies to help identify the unique opportunities offered by the strengths of the region within the emerging technologies landscape. Stay tuned, more details will be published soon…!