Inside Innovation

Potential Collaborators

Of particular interest to MRF are the tiny circles on the fringes of the map. These represent newer, adjacent pathways of research—and potential areas for future collaboration. "I would say that probably 95% of the laboratories doing work in the field are known to our team," says Bromley. "There's probably 5% that are on the hairy edge somewhere. And those are the ones, of course, that are of greatest interest to us."

In a corporate setting, the tool can be used in a similar way to shape strategy. As an example, BCG used the network mapping tool to find acquisition targets for a health-care company. The company's conventional mergers-and-acquisitions research yielded only one target. But the BCG tool picked up hundreds of other potential targets—each was filing patents in adjacent technologies, but until then they had flown under the company's radar screen.