For our next look at the inspirations for semantic web innovation, we spoke with Michael Osofsky, co-founder and chief innovation officer of NetBase. (See the first in the series here.) As we reported here, NetBase is the creator of the semantic search technology that powers tools including ScienceBase, HealthBase and most recently ConsumerBase, to help researchers in the scientific, medical, and CPG spaces, respectively, harness the wealth of content and social media commentary on the web for insights. Earlier this month it announced that it has raised $9 million in venture capital funding, completing its Series C round with Altos Ventures and Thomvest Ventures Inc.

You might say NetBase was inspired by a young engineer’s disappointment: Some time ago, Osofsky was a passionate employee of Ariba in its earlier days as a B-to-B marketplace, and saw a project he’d worked on for a year get the axe. Looking back, he understands that that kind of thing happens all the time in the business world, but at the time it fueled his determination “to not see that happen to any work I did or any other engineer did.” So he headed for MIT’s Sloan School of Management to learn how to do innovation the right way. There he learned that innovation is a successful combination of understanding the needs of consumers and customers, and understanding what new technologies and inventions are available that might be applied in interesting ways to address those needs.

“Then I undertook to create an enormous database of needs and technologies, because I wanted to crank out innovations one after the next, like an innovation engine,” he recounts. He’d sit in cafes, hang out at sushi bars, and listen to what people were chatting about to help pinpoint unfulfilled needs, go home and record that in his database, and then surf MIT and other research facilities’ web sites to see what technologies were being developed, and encode those details into the database too. Then it hit him. “This grand idea ended up turning into NetBase, because it turned out that the database I was thinking of creating on needs and solutions already existed – it was the web. This wonderful world wide web contained a wealth of information about people’s needs, too; what they liked and disliked about existing products and trends, and also there was a wealth of information about technologies.”

The Missing Link
What was missing was a way to harvest it all, “to crack this hard problem of extracting valuable information about people’s needs, inventions and technologies, to fuel the innovators of the world with vital data they needed to make their innovations work for them.” That became NetBase’s mission, as Osofsky researched and questioned how different technologies that now come under the semantic web umbrella – natural language processing, text analytics, latent semantic analysis, computational linguistics – could be leveraged to extract such data. “A better way to go was to harvest the information automatically,” he says, “Innovation is a game of chance and to improve the odds you have to have more turns at bat.”

Osofsky says that while the semantic web is an important part of what makes NetBase what it is, it’s also important to continue innovating for his company to be a market-driven business, not a tech-driven one. And that’s why it’s important for him to stay hands-on with customers and their needs. “My personal ambitions really reflect a lot of what MIT stands for,” he says, recalling the school’s Latin motto “Mens et Manus” (Mind and Hand). “I love to dig into our customers’ problems, just rip into them tenaciously because then I get a deeper and deeper understanding of what’s needed. Then once I have exhausted what I can learn from a customer problem I actually will conduct research for customers, to try as best I can to put myself in their shoes and really experience what they have to deal with in doing research.”

Equally, he loves to dig into what NetBase’s own engineers are producing, and how that can be applied to customer’s issues. That’s good for the customer, and engineers’ seeing their company’s co-founder take such a strong interest in their work should be good for the innovation cycle at NetBase, as well. To continue driving innovation beyond the original concept that launched the enterprise, “companies need to be in a constant state of renewal,” he says. “As we scale the company it will be important to keep that idea alive – not rest on our laurels and keep the agility up.”

In fact, he subscribes to the expression “fail faster” as much for NetBase’s customers as for NetBase itself. “In some ways that accelerates innovation,” he says. “Take an idea; assess it in a very cheap way with tools like ours to understand consumers and markets and technologies; and be able to separate the good idea from ten bad ones fast, and so run with the good idea faster.”

The series continues on Friday.