Today, Empathy.co, innovator in ethical discovery, launches its new Open Innovation entity. The new, industry-first project is an innovation-led, go-to-market approach to rapidly test, validate and share new tech solutions in a public forum.
Dedicated, multi-disciplinary squads will follow a “building in public” mindset and work together with new and existing Empathy.co partners across the retail and tech sectors. The Open Innovation methodology moves away from ‘productised’ technology by collaborating with retailers to understand real business problems and create solutions that better serve retail brands.
Open Innovation projects already underway include:
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Open Privacy – in partnership with Privacy Cloud this area explores innovative ways to approach ePrivacy concerns, such as offering ePrivacy stress tests. These provide retailers with tools to assess privacy risks, identify what data is used to train AI as well as know how they comply with the privacy standards set by GDPR and their use of their consumers’ data.
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Open Explainability – looks at how to understand and optimise search results by combining multiple models and variants, testing different search scenarios and vector keyword combinations while preserving explainability and accountability. The Open Explainability team is exploring vector visualisation to easily understand the relationship between the query and its related terms in a friendly, visual way.
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Open Relevance – a new way of searching with Holon-based experiences, Open Relevance aims to put the customer at the centre to inspire and guide through the pre-search experience while helping merchants to create privacy-first personalisation. Open Relevance solves the problem of non-result searches by unifying vector search with keyword search, displaying results by relevance,size, motion and their interrelations to enhance the search capability and create more intelligent searches.
Open Innovation is already working within retail brands such as Carrefour, Kroger and Bosch to deliver a new wave of innovation within the eCommerce sector. While working with Empathy.co’s existing partners to explore new areas of innovation, the Open Innovation team is also calling on retail brands to engage with them directly through workshops, seminars and innovation days to connect with product teams, designers and developers across the eCommerce and tech sectors.
Angel Maldonado, CEO at Empathy.co commented: “Innovation is essential to all tech businesses, especially in the current industry landscape. However, too often our gaze and focus as developers in this industry is on innovation for innovation’s sake rather than centred on solving real and tangible problems for businesses or consumers.
“Open Innovation shakes up this status-quo and moves away from ‘productised’ tech and build to an innovation-led culture that looks at problems from a business perspective rather than a product one. As the landscape of the tech and eCommerce sectors becomes increasingly competitive and challenging, it’s vital we take this approach. We’re thrilled to bring both tech and retail partners with us as we look to rapidly innovate and solve the challenges businesses are facing today.”
