Knowledge Share: putting the user first

NETVAL is a recognized association that brings together 66 universities, 15 public research institutes (PROs), 17 Research Hospitals and 9 other members. Its mission is to improve public research valorization processes by creating and animating a community of TTO professionals.

Client:

NETVAL – Italian Network for Research Valorisation

Industry:

Tech & Research

Year:

Ongoing

KnowledgeShare-section1-image

The initial situation

Knowledge Share is the biggest Matchmaking Platform for Deeptech Innovation which support and enables the valorization of research results generated by universities, Research Hospitals and PROs at a National level. Knowledge Share is a joint project which involves NETVAL, the Italian Patent and Trademark Office at Ministry of Enterprises and Made in Italy (MIMIT-UIBM) and Politecnico di Torino, the university that contributed to the platform initial development steps. Its goal is to communicate patents and Start-Ups in a simple and straightforward format, highlighting how the projects can be exploited in a real industrial environment and how they solve industry challenges or market problems, facilitating the connection between industry, innovators and academia.  Knowledge Share has been recognized in 2021 as a best practice for the promotion of IP valorization by the European Union.

At the beginning of the project the portal had several critical issues: an outdated technology stack, unintuitive and user-unfriendly navigation, and an inaccurate intellectual property database. 20tab was hired to address these issues.

Main Technical Activities

Discovery

UX / UI Design

Tools and Practices

Design Thinking

DevOps

Impact Mapping

User Story Mapping

Customer Journey Map

Opportunity Solution Tree

Implemented activities

In addition, we studied its UX and UI, proposing improvements in terms of graphics, brand identity and awareness of Knowledge Share. We also carried out the analysis and implementation of the new code, up to the release of the remote environments.

Finally, we migrated the existing data to make the whole process of enhancement and integration on the portal complete and effective.

First, we listened to the platform's end users: during discovery, we interviewed users to understand what aspects made using Knowledge Share difficult and less fruitful.

KnowledgeShare-COVER

Implemented technologies

Final result

The portal has undergone a general modernization of the technology stack, improved performance, and multi-tenant and multi-language readiness as a result of 20tab's intervention.

The brand has its own clear identity and the design has been thoroughly reworked to provide a more pleasant and simple user experience. This will also improve the quality of life for TTOs during the patent creation process.

Finally, a granular permissions system was implemented and a new logic for user roles/types was created.

KnowledgeShare-Final-result

The KS 2.0 platform was officially presented

on January 23rd at the CNR headquarters in Rome: the event involved key Italian innovation players, both academic (universities, research centers and Research Hospitals) and entrepreneurial (SMEs, large companies, investors).

eventoKS2.0