Recommendations to creatively unlock value in proprietary dataset of emerging technology startups

Project Description

Lux Research is an independent research and advisory firm, providing strategic advice and ongoing intelligence on emerging technologies. Lux has 250 corporate clients, who use the Lux Intelligence Services to scout innovative companies and technology trends and growth areas, for their R&D, corporate venture capital, new business development, and global strategy organizations, for over 20 coverage areas such as Autonomous Systems, Sustainable Building Materials, Alternative Fuels, Solar, Advanced Materials, Water, Industrial Big Data & Analytics, Wearable Electronics, and more. Lux Analysts have deep technical expertise, with acadmic and industry backgrounds in the physical sciences. 

Since 2008, as part of providing company profiles to clients who subscribe to the Intelligence Services, Lux analysts have assembed a unique proprietary database of worldwide companies, mostly startups. Analysts create profiles by engaging technically knowledgeable representatives of the company directly in a one-on-one interview (usually by phone), fact-check and evaluate them against comparable companies, and publish the standardized profiles to clients. 

Because of the particular technical skillsets of our analysts and the linear, sequential publication schedule, our analysts are not typically involved in looking at the data asset as a whole. We are currently looking for a creative data scientist to prototype and explore valuable uses of our dataset that we have not yet determined. As an example, last year a full-time data scientist who is no longer with Lux, took on a quick project to look at whether the "lux take" (a 1-5 point rating that ranges from "strong caution" (negative) to "wait & see" (neutral) to "strong positive" (positive)) that we had given companies 5 years ago had any correlation to actual company outcomes. He found a meaningful correlation, which validated our rating methodology, and we published a white paper about it. 

We envision a roughly 1-month project. The early stage would involve diving in and understanding the Lux methodology and the strengths and limitations of our dataset. We would then expect the data scientist to explore the dataset, with Lux staff being available to answer questions and provide direction in an iterative and frequent feedback loop. The key outputs would be recommendations to Lux, which could take the form of 

• analysis and findings of technology or business trends in the dataset

• suggested ways to visualize and present the company dataset

• new and valuable use cases of the company dataset, both for existing clients as well as new potential customers

• recommendations for ways in which the dataset and research methodology could be improved in the future (new kinds of data to capture, more or less frequent updates, augmentation with other data sources, etc.)

Some sample company profiles are provided with this proposal, along with some basic overview statistics on the overall database.